I got back home from running errands right before the storm hit. My phone gave that loud alarm with a flash flood warning stating to shelter in place, that it was a matter of life and death. For hours the rain poured and the thunder was constant. It was exciting but the noise level was exhausting.
Sunset views.
When the rain began, while there was still visibility.The view from our driveway after the storm passed.
After the storm, we had a beautiful sunset. Today the rain should be here at 11 a.m. and last until the sun goes down again. I guess this is the Monsoon season I’ve heard so much about.
Have a great weekend everyone!
What are your plans for the weekend? Are you having any unusual weather?
When I got home from movie day at a neighbor’s house yesterday, I immediately texted my kids to watch the movie “Lion.” Then I bought the movie online so my husband could watch it, too.
The movie stars Dev Patel from “Slumdog Millionaire” fame and Nicole Kidman. The actor who plays the five-year-old main character Saroo is amazing and steals the show. It’s based on a true story of a young boy who gets lost and separated from his family. He’s eventually adopted by a loving couple a continent away from home. He tries to find his family 25 years later.
It’s powerful story. It’s intense. It’s easily the best movie I’ve watched in years. It came out in 2016 and I wonder how I missed it? It was nominated for six Oscars and won BAFTA awards. It’s a movie produced jointly by Australia and the UK, but was distributed in the US by the Weinstein Company. In any case, I’m thankful for the invitation to movie day and the discovery of this movie.
As for movie day, I was a little uncomfortable going to a neighbor’s home I had never met before. She had a dozen women over, all older than me. I knew only two of them. Eventually, I relaxed and enjoyed myself. The food was delicious. It was a potluck lunch and the host hand-churned mint and strawberry-ice cream for dessert!
Have you seen the movie “Lion?” If yes, what was your opinion of it? What are a few of the best movies you’ve watched this year?
I was sitting in the casita writing with Olive the cat on my lap when “knock knock knock” sounded on the wall. The kitty leaped and tore out of the room. I quickly followed the cat into my husband’s office.
I told him what happened and he went outside to investigate. He came back empty handed, so I guess it was a bird? Maybe a woodpecker.
Book Club
I finished reading my book club selection in a few days. I dedicated time to get it done, plus it was a pleasant, easy read. I was fascinated with the story about the Post cereal heiress and her extravagant life. Her father, C.W. Post, who changed how America ate breakfast with Grape Nuts, raised his only child Marjorie to be a hard worker and ready to take over his business. But as a woman, she didn’t have the right to vote, let alone sit on a Board of Directors. She ran the company, which became General Foods, by proxy — through men including a husband and a friend of her father’s.
I told my husband about the story and he mentioned a TV show called “The Food that Built America.” I watched an episode that included Marjorie Post when she bought Birdseye frozen foods. It also highlighted the dueling Mars and Hershey’s companies.
Movie Day
A neighbor I have never met texted and invited me to her home for movie day. She said the movie is “Lion.” I’ve never seen it, but it sounds interesting. I was instructed to bring a salad. I agreed to go because I am trying everything out to see what I enjoy and to meet people.
A funny thing happened yesterday. This neighbor sent a long winded text going through all the details she’s doing to prepare for movie day –everything from cleaning, cooking to getting her hair done. She sent it to the invitees. Then she texted again embarrassed saying she thought she was texting her daughter!
I have one of the most embarrassing text snafus to share. But I’ll save it for another day!
What are some of the mistakes you’ve made with texts or emails? Have you been on the receiving end of a text error?
Sunrise view from my bedroom. It’s going to be a hot day! Again.
This morning I had the news on in the background and I had to turn it off. Between the shark and alligator attacks I finally lost it when a man got hit by a car and people robbed him while he was lying in the road.
I too was hit as a pedestrian. I was lying on the road inches aways from car tires rushing by my bleeding head. At least I wasn’t robbed!
The reporter kept mentioning that it was a hot summer and therefore would be a crime-filled summer. Does hot equal violence and crime?
I decided to look it up. Here’s an excerpt from the first article I found:
Tracking ambient temperature and crime rates, a Finland study used nearly two decades of data to identify a possible connection between them. Researchers found that temperature changes were responsible for 10 percent of fluctuations in the nation’s crime rates — a 1.7 percent increase in criminal activity for each degree centigrade rise in the temperature. More specifically, the study found that increased serotonin levels resulting from high temperature likely contributed to increased impulsivity and a higher risk of crimes.
The reasons why hot weather equals an increase in crime included more opportunity. In freezing winter climates, there aren’t as many opportunities for crime. The other reason was that hot weather increases aggression.
I turned off the TV after I started to feel anxious. I don’t need all this sensationalist selling of soap in my life. I’ve got a busy week and want to have a positive outlook.
What are your thoughts about hot weather and crime? Do you think they are related? Does a heat wave make a crime wave? Do people get “hot under the collar?”
I love the color of these cactus blooms. I’m surprised to see cacti blooming again.
We’ve had a busy weekend — post vacation. We picked up friends from the airport Thursday and they invited us over to their house for dinner the next day to repay us for our trouble. They lived a stone’s throw from us in Palm Springs and we both moved within a mile from each other in Arizona — without prior knowledge we were both doing that. Our kids went to school together from kindergarten through high school. Now our kids live near each other in the Bay Area.
Here’s a view from our friend’s place up the street from us. Woodpecker standing on the wall. I don’t know how it does that. There’s nothing to hang onto.
We had neighbors over for appetizers, wine and games. We played my favorite card games, Demon and Texas Hold ‘Em. Our friends brought over a game they thought we’d enjoy. My husband and I laughed when we found out it was Catchphrase. That’s a game our kids played endlessly at swim meets with their teammates under the pop-up tent. We’d be at meets for at least four hours and they’d swim a few minutes. Downtime was spent playing cards or Catchphrase.
It’s been years since I’ve played games and it was a hoot. We laughed and had fun. it was a perfect thing to do with people we’ve only known for a few months.
For appetizers I made deviled eggs, stuffed shishitos with honey goat cheese and sweet Italian sausage chunks on toothpicks with honeycrisp apples. Also a veggie platter that was barely touched.
Here’s the gorgeous sunrise Saturday morning.
I enjoyed watching the kitty watch birds and bunnies. The quail families are growing up!
What card games do you like to play? Did you play lots of games growing up? Do you think kids today play games or is everything on screens now?
I saw a blogger on TV talk about “banishing the play-date.” You can read his post here.
I reminisced about my childhood. I played in and out of neighbors’ backyards, rode bikes from dawn to dusk — with no adults bothering me.
When I had kids, I found they didn’t have freedom like we did. One of the reasons was there were zero kids in our neighborhood besides mine. Then the nine-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his front yard and murdered — 20 minutes from us. It left moms frightened to let their kids out of their sight.
I went to Mommy and Me with my son at the Palm Springs Pavilion. We learned to sing songs together like “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “I’m a Little Teapot” with a dozen other moms and babies who apparently needed the coaching. Each week, we took turns bringing snacks of grapes and string cheese. I look back at this as a training ground for the proverbial play-date.
This was what the original equipment was like at our park.
Play-dates developed from the Mommy and Me group. We had a park day, which was fun and healthy. Moms sat together on quilts on the grass and talked for hours while our kids played on the now-banned playground equipment — a super tall, steep slide, a merry-go-round, and a stagecoach that they could climb into, on top of and jump off of. Sometime during their early childhood years, our city tore out the dated, dangerous equipment and put in rubber ground and safe equipment. Our kids never liked to play on the brightly-colored equipment and our park play-dates vanished. We laughed about the slide where the kids would get stuck going down. It was a “sue proof” slide.
One day, I got a phone call from a friend. She homeschooled her daughter and hand-picked her friends for a weekly Friday Play-Group. She hired a teacher to run play-group, and each week included a lesson, theme, craft and snack, followed by 10 minutes of supervised play on her backyard swing set.
I felt honored to have my children chosen for the select group. My kids had made the cut. Months later, she took me to lunch at CPK and told me she had some big news. She was uninviting one of the boys. I hardly saw this is earth shattering, but perhaps there was more to this luncheon. Maybe it was a warning!
Years later, when my kids were in high school, they reconnected with friends from play-group. NOTE: This wasn’t just a play-date, it was play-group. They remembered it as if they were fellow Mouseketeers, having survived a bizarre childhood experience.
FYI, I’m using The Playgroup” as the basis for a manuscript I’m currently writing. It follows the friendships and lives of four moms with their young children. They are all bound by the cryptic “Playgroup.”
When my daughter reached 6th grade, we tried homeschooling. Every Wednesday, I picked up her best friend from the local middle school, and brought her to our house to play until her mom got off work. This was another sort of play-date. We moms thought it was an ideal way to keep their friendship going. Since my daughter loved arts and crafts — homeschooling allowed her to try ceramics, mosaics, and quilting — I said that the two girls could do an art project each week.
But that didn’t happen. I was tired from supervising my daughter’s activities to the half hour, and my daughter just wanted to hang out with her friend. So, I retired to my room and left them alone. After a few weeks, the friend didn’t want to come over anymore. She said she was promised an art activity and she was disappointed that they weren’t doing one.
My daughter on a camping trip at the beach.
That made me think about our kids and their overly structured lives. I love having quiet time. I hope my kids do, too. We need to unplug, unschedule, and let our kids regain their creativity and inner peace. They need us to leave them alone and let them be kids.
What are your thoughts about arranged play dates, play groups and activities for kids? Do you think kids are over-scheduled today? Did you have to arrange play time with friends for your kids or did you live in an area where they could go outside and play?
I’m trying to be open-minded about book club. I joined wanting to meet people in my neighborhood. Plus, I had never been in a book club before. Several of my friends from Palm Springs were in book clubs and they tried to get me to join. I always shied away for various reasons — not enough time, not wanting to be assigned a book, wanting to read what I want on my own schedule…
You can read about my first impressions of book club HERE.
I got an email yesterday from the woman who is hosting July’s book club. She asked which date next week would be good for “The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post,” by Allison Pataki.
Yikes. This is the first time I heard the title. I’m thinking I missed an email with the book selection — or she announced the title at the last meeting which I didn’t attend due to vacation. Or, the entire book club is getting one week’s notice to order and read the book.
I’ve ordered it from Amazon. I’m going to give it my best effort because it does look like a book I’d enjoy. I also downloaded it to Audible. It’s a little over 14 hours long. But once again I’m struggling with book club and wondering if it’s more annoying than fun?
Have you read “The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post?” How much time do you think book club should give people to read a book? How does your book club work with book selections?
