Category Archives: Kids

Ash Wednesday Thoughts

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brother and sister at piano
My kids at a piano recital. I’m posting this photo from years ago because my daughter would say she was giving up piano lessons for Lent.

I’m going to try and go to Ash Wednesday services today. I say “try” because the church by our house is so busy! On special days, I can’t make a right hand turn to go 1/2 mile to get to the parish because the cars are lined up at least a mile down the street. I sit at the stop sign, hoping for someone to let me in. I’ve had to turn around and go home because nobody let me in. How Christian of them!

I do believe that Lent is a good time to reflect on our lives. One Ash Wednesday service in past years stands out to me. Rather than giving something up — like chocolate or alcohol — the priest suggested doing something. He talked about investing more time in prayer or volunteering to help someone else. He felt it should be a time of giving of ourselves. He suggested reading the book of Mark from the Bible during the 40 days of Lent.

I’m a convert to Catholicism so I had to learn about Lent. I didn’t grow up with it. My kids did and my daughter always said she was giving up piano lessons for Lent. Yes, she hated piano. I thought piano had so many benefits and forced her to take lessons, years beyond what I should have done, she often reminds me.

If you don’t observe Lent and wonder what it’s all about, here’s a definition from Britannica:

Lent, in the Christian church, a period of penitential preparation for Easter. In Western churches it begins on Ash Wednesday, six and a half weeks before Easter, and provides for a 40-day fast (Sundays are excluded), in imitation of Jesus Christ’s fasting in the wilderness before he began his public ministry. In Eastern churches Lent begins on the Monday of the seventh week before Easter and ends on the Friday that is nine days before Easter. This 40-day “Great Lent” includes Saturdays and Sundays as relaxed fast days.

Here’s a link to Good Housekeeping’s article called 25 Creative Things to Give Up for Lent in 2021: From gossip and complaining to junk food and coffee, ditching these habits could change your life by Juliana Labianca. There are a lot of good ideas to do in that article that could improve your life — whether or not you observe Lent.

Another thing I’m doing is taking a 40-day Lenten Challenge on the Hallow App. It’s with Mark Wahlberg, Chris Pratt, Jonathan Roumie and Fr. Mike Schmitz. If you haven’t tried Hallow, I really enjoy it and recommend it to add to your prayer life.

Do you have plans for Lent? If so, what are they?

What are your thoughts about doing something as opposed to giving up something?

Volcano, Beach and Hawaiian Daredevils

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I looked up at palm trees while on sandy beach near Hilo.

Here are a few photos and videos from our family vacation over Christmas week. We visited beaches, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and lastly, I posted a video of two daredevils on Rainbow Falls in our rental house’s backyard. All I can say is WOW!

Flying into Honolulu over Waikiki Beach. I can’t believe how much it’s grown. I was thankful we stayed on the Big Island in a rain forest!

Kīlauea before the rain started pouring. Our kids and DIL made a day hike out of view points and hiking down into and out of the caldera. My husband and I stuck to the crater rim trail to see views — until it was socked in and we couldn’t see a thing. Plus, it was wet and freezing cold. I wasn’t dressed for the weather. I was thinking Hawaii in my mind. Kudos for the kids hanging in there and seeing marvelous sites.

Looking down into the caldera.

This was a video I took of waves at a beach called Richardson Ocean Park. It was very busy on Christmas Day. My son and DIL traveled further away with our rental car and hiked to a Green Sand Beach (Papakōlea Beach). We took a Lyft to the beach and met the kindest man, Eddie Spaghetti, our driver who was in his 80s and has lived his life in Hawaii. Now that we’re home, Eddie calls and sends us videos and photos of his grandson and other family members. We made a friend!

Richardson Ocean Park was 20 minutes from our rental home.

Here’s the story of Aloha spirit and why the beach park was named after George Richardson.

A little critter hanging out inside a kitchen window.

AND NOW FOR SOME EXCITEMENT:

Was I surprised to see someone standing at the edge of the falls. I watched the guy walking back and forth, scoping it out. Then his friend in a pink boat showed up. They took a few practice runs before doing this! Watch it all.

FYI, I looked up Rainbow Falls and learned that swimming is not allowed because it’s extremely dangerous. Thanks for tagging along on our Hawaiian vacation!

I post Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you missed part one of our Hawaiian vacation with views of our unique rental home, designed by two architects from San Francisco for their own home, it’s posted HERE.

Would you attempt a daredevil move like the two guys above?

What’s one of the scariest things you’ve done?

Travel Day

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A photo I took of Red on his flamingo buddy the day before we left.

Travel day turned out to be uneventful, thankfully. There wasn’t a single delay or cancelled flight on the boards when we arrived. We got through TSA in a snap. Waffles was a trooper and besides finding the one stray M&M under a seat in the airport, he was well behaved.

After asking my husband repeatedly if he had packed his swimming trunks, when I unpacked at the hotel, I realized that I had forgotten my swim suit. The hotel has an amazing spa with a steam room, jacuzzi and pool. I was looking forward to daily lap swimming and enjoying the luxury of soaking in their various tubs and using the steam room and sauna.

Where I sat outside with Waffles waiting for a friend of my daughter’s to pick him up for a week. This was outside the hotel with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. My daughter needs one more week to heal from her shoulder surgery before she can take care of Waffles the pug.

Sunrise view from our bedroom at home before we left for the airport.

Ginger snaps and chocolate chunk cookies my son baked for us the day before his surgery.

I lost a lot of sleep over travel worries and worry about my son. Although he’s in a lot of pain post surgery, the doctor said it went well.

Berkeley Views and the Best Pizza in the World

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These are photos from my recent trip to Berkeley and Oakland, California. I was helping my daughter, post her shoulder surgery.

This is the Cheeseboard pizza from Thursday. Cremini mushroom and Kale with a side of their famous cilantro pepper sauce to dip the crust. As an added bonus, they top your slice with a sliver! Cheeseboard Collective is an institution in Berkeley.

Here’s the background info from Cheeseboard’s website:

About Our Pizza

Cheese Board Pizza started with a simple, fun idea during one of our shifts

We’d grab some extra sourdough baguette dough, pick our favorite cheeses from the counter, and toss on veggies from the market next door to make pizzas just for us. Then, in 1985, we decided to share the fun and started serving a single type of vegetarian pizza to customers after hours on Friday nights. Each night, we’d make one fresh, unique pizza with veggies, specialty cheeses from the Cheese Board, and a thin, sourdough crust.

Today, that same recipe is still our go-to. The Pizzeria, now located just two doors south of the Cheese Shop and Bakery, is open for lunch and dinner four days a week. We’ve also added salads, roasted garlic, cookies, soft serve ice cream, sodas, beer, and wine. Live music is part of the scene at both lunch and dinner, adding to the vibrant atmosphere. Even though the line for pizza often stretches down the block, it moves quickly, with music keeping things lively along the way.

About Our Pizza

Here’s a rose I saw on my walk from my Berkeley Airbnb and Cheeseboard.

Beautiful Bougainvillea I spotted on a walk in Oakland with my son and daughter-in-law.

I’m not sure what these berries are. I just thought it made a unique shot on my walk to Cheeseboard for a slice.

Berkeley is a beautiful town when you open your eyes and notice the little things like flowers.

The tree-lined streets made for nice walks when I returned to my Airbnb after taking care of my daughter at my son’s apartment.

This was my cozy Airbnb — a separate room with it’s own entrance at the back of a home. I stayed here five years ago when my son had shoulder surgery. It has a bathroom, bedroom and a kitchenette.

Now for everything Cheeseboard:

My last three evenings, I walked from the Airbnb to Cheeseboard for a slice of pizza (and a sliver) before it got dark. It was my daughter’s idea. She told me to go home early so I could have Cheeseboard, which is a treat I enjoy when I visit my kids. Prior to my Cheeseboard walks, I was getting home after dark, exhausted and savoring a cup of chowder I had bought the day I arrived. I wrote about Cheeseboard years ago: How long would you wait for pizza? Hint: It’s Cheese Board.

I’d walk around Shattuck Avenue for about 30 minutes then get in line at Cheeseboard and walk home with my salad and slice. Yes, I’d get in line because there is always a line. There is also a cheese shop two doors down owned by Cheeseboard where I’d buy a few treats for the kids to bring the next day, like their favorite cheese, crackers, chips and homemade tomatillo salsa.

About Cheeseboard: They make one flavor of pizza per day and one salad. No special orders except Gluten and/or Vegan free. The pizza’s randomly change according to fresh produce and they locally source cheese. There is never meat on a Cheeseboard pizza.

I had this one and will say it was really, really good. I liked the Cremini/Kale better, though.

The pizza I had on my last night in Berkeley.

This is the line going into Cheeseboard. The open door near the front of the photo goes into their cheese and bakery shop.

The line wound around the corner and down the street.

If you go to Berkeley, I highly recommend a slice of pizza at Cheeseboard.

What’s your favorite pizza or a pizza spot?

What do you think of my Berkeley photos?

If you’ve never been there, did you think it would be so beautiful?

Why Our Son Missed Summer Vacation

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My kids celebrating a birthday with Natasha our rottie years ago in the family home.

We were looking forward to our son staying with us in the Santa Barbara area during our vacation. His wife had the start of the school year as a teacher. My daughter also had a new year beginning at UC Berkeley where she works. It was just going to be our son joining us, which would have been unique, because we rarely if ever have time alone with him.

But it was not to be.

He was out for a walk in his neighborhood when he called to tell us a huge Rottweiler came up behind him and bit him in the thigh. He was pretty shaken up and his wife was driving him to urgent care.

At urgent care he asked about rabies vaccines while they tended to his bite.

The staff at urgent care said there hasn’t been a case of a dog with rabies in eight years in his county, so it wasn’t necessary. My son was reading about rabies online. It’s fatal so he was more than concerned. I told him to call his insurance or animal control. He couldn’t get through to animal control but did reach the County health department. They instructed him to go to an ER, not an urgent care, and get rabies vaccinations. They had a dog with rabies two weeks prior.

Also, since the dog was a stray, there was no way they could track the dog to see if it had rabies or not. It might have escaped a yard. Or it could truly be a stray dog with no home.

The other thing that was scary besides getting attacked and bitten by a dog, was my son discovered online that if insurance doesn’t cover rabies vaccines, they are ridiculously expensive.

He got the first rabies vaccine which was extremely painful. He said the needle was like a needle on a sewing machine and the diameter of the syringe was the size of a nickel. They stabbed him five or six times in the wound to fill the area with human rabies immune globulin. Then he got a shot in the arm with the rabies vaccine. He had to go back for more vaccines — which just happened to be during the time he took off work to join us at the beach.

The good news is he received treatment. At first I suggested that he follow the urgent care’s advice and not to worry about rabies vaccines. That was first of all, because I trusted their advice, and second, that the costs my son found online were around $36,000 for the shots!

He called the other day to say he got the bill from the ER. His bill was about $2,000. His health insurance covered $85,000. Yes, that’s $85,000 for two shots! He hasn’t received the bill yet for the rest of the shots.

What are your thoughts about shots to save your life costing more than $85,000?

A Blast from the Past

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My son at age four and half at our riverfront property in Washington State that my grandfather bought for a few dollars during the Great Depression.

I am facing a chore I’ve put off for years. I have stacks of photo albums with many of the same photos and duplicates from my high school years through raising kids — before digital photos became a thing. We had a photo developer a few blocks from our house in Palm Springs called Double Photo. Yes, you got two photos for the price of one for every roll of film you brought in. I’d walk to the store, pushing a double stroller with kids plus rolls of film treating them like treasure. Hence my abundance of photos and closet full of photo albums. I’d mail the double photos to Mom, but after she passed, they were all returned to me.

I’m finally addressing the elephant in my closet by tackling one album a day. I take out the photos I want to keep and put them in a photo box. The album with remaining photos gets tossed.

Here are a few photos I found this week that bring back memories:

Here I am at our property with both kids, my daughter aged 18 months, throwing a punch?

My son before little sis was born, bathing in the kitchen sink.

Baby Kat at our park for the Fireman’s annual egg hunt.

My son eating steamer clams we dug together in Washington at my mom’s house. Funny, he’s allergic to all seafood now.

My husband and I took a rewards trip to Hong Kong thanks to the company he worked for. This is the parking lot of the Peninsula Hotel. I couldn’t believe their fleet of cars. Or the flowers for a wedding.

Wow! I’ve never seen a wedding with so many flowers before. I guess it goes along with the cars.

Then in typical China fashion, this was a side of pork at a local open air market. Such a contrast between the haves and have nots.

A picture of me in Hong Kong. We were all turned around time wise and I tripped on the curb outside our hotel — my first steps outside — and sprained my ankle. We have lots of photos of me sitting on that trip wearing an ace bandage. Kind of foreshadowed our trip to the lake in Eastern Arizona last month!

What do you do with photos from the past vs. digital photos?

The Job Hunt

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Baby Waffles
Baby pic of Waffles, our daughter’s pug, turned eight-years old this week!

My husband and I were talking about how it can be difficult looking and applying for jobs. Currently our DIL is on the job hunt after her recovery from cancer surgery and chemo.

That reminded me of when I moved to Palm Springs to get married. I was perfectly content to spend my days soaking up the sun, floating on an air mattress in the apartment complex’s pool, when my hubby said I needed to help out and get a job.

My husband said, “I’ve been there and it sure can be tough finding a job.”

He had been literally pounding the pavement for a job and finally got hired.

As a journalism major, I applied to the local newspaper, The Desert Sun, to be a reporter.

I went through an interview process that took a few weeks, including literacy and writing tests.

My husband suggested that while I was waiting, I interview at a few more places like local radio stations where he had connections.

Then sitting one day sitting by the pool, the phone rang. My husband said it was for me.

It was a man named Cliff Brown from Cliff Brown and Associates, a PR firm located in the Bob Hope building at the local medical center. Cliff asked me to come in for an interview. I had never applied there. It turns out he was too cheap for classified ads, so on his daily trip to The Desert Sun to drop off press releases and photos, he rifled through their employment files. He pulled out my application and resume and called me. I was hired the next day.

My husband shook his head and said, “That’s now how it works!”

I told my husband that yes, that was how my first PR job in Seattle worked. I was working in a hotel restaurant as a waitress through college and one of my regular customers asked me what my degree was in. He asked me on the spot to come work for his company, which was a Native Alaskan fishing and timber company. They needed a brochure and other material. I worked there until the Seattle office closed down and I met my future husband.

How did you get your first career job? Did you have to send out resumes and pound the pavement?