Let Me Get Back To You, I'm Busy Blogging

This weekend I’m on the road and in Ohio at the River Teeth writing conference.  Lots of good people speaking and expanding my mind.  Also on the agenda is one-on-one work with Joe Mackall, whose memoir The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage needs to be on everyone’s reading list.  Then when you finish that, move on to his look at an Ohio Amish community in Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish.

Blogger Nadine Feldman pointed me toward another blog that likes to keep it short and sweet.  If you only have a minute, try out Just a Minute, I’m Busy.  After reading an entry you’ll still have time to eat a sandwich before your minute’s up.

When you’re cutting into a fresh, delicious piece of salmon or halibut, think of fabulous blogger and Alaskan fisherwoman, Tele.  Right now she’s out there in the cold northern ocean with iffy internet connection. You’ll be hooked on Hooked when you read her last post just before she hit the wide sea.  It tells us a touching and eye-opening tale of a side of that large, wild state most of us never hear about.

Sometimes a delayed flight is worth it.  What do you think?

And finally, if you’re wondering when I’m going to return your phone call, answer your e-mail, or otherwise take care of business, maybe this has something to do with it.  (If you posted this on your blog this week, please speak up in the comments so I can give you credit.  I forgot to note the source for the link.

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What are you doing for the weekend?  Share your plans in the comments box.

Hats Off To Summer - A Photo Essay

Going to market in Dijon, FR

Now is the time to pull out the gardening hat.  A wide-brimmed one is better than sunglasses because you can carry your shade tree around with you as you push cart after cart of compost and mulch.  With a generous dollop of sunscreen it protects against nasty melanoma, even if it does give you “hat hair.”  And it’s the one hat that everyone seems to look good in.  If you want to wear one but can’t decide, you need to know what hat fits what kind of face.  Simple, right?

Everyone has put away their Easter bonnets by now, but I’m also thinking hats because there was a grand parade of them down in Louisville this weekend.  It’s a little late for Kentucky Derby Day, but in homage to this past weekend event and all the upcoming gardening still to do, here’s a photo essay of hats of all sizes shapes and colors to welcome in the summer.
 

In Dijon, FR during the summer, you rarely see a child without a hat.

The parents are almost obsessive about this protection in all weather.

I’m not sure what kind of girl guide uniform this is that I saw in Lyon.

 I’m braver than when I took this and would now ask them to what group they belonged.

Dijon has at least three hat shops.  The windows are always so lovely, but I rarely see any women

wearing these around town.  I like it in sepia because the idea of a hat shop seems so quaint and antiquated.

Even the men have their shop.

When the mother of a friend passed away, he asked me to take photos of some of  the

dozens of hats she had owned and worn faithfully.

A young girl and her hat, by Auguste Rodin (the Rodin museum in Paris).

Topping off the central statue in Place François Rude, named after the Dijonnaise sculptor.

This poor fellow is frequently the focus of many jokes like this.

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And a tip of the hat to these recent blogs:

How many of you have eaten fry bread (I raise my hand with enthusiasm)?  Jody Lea Stewart gives the history of this Native American staple.  Eat it with some cinnamon.

 Speaking of gardening, Cristina Santiestevan,  harvests photographs as well as vegetables in her post.  Makes me sorry I decided not to plant my vegetable garden this summer.

Nadine Feldman reflects on other homegrown skills as she explores her new hometown and “Women’s Work.”

And what a great post!  You have to read it!  Katie Morell thinks that some people have an exclamation point addiction.  Ain’t that the truth?! :)

Are you a hat wearer?  What was your most favorite hat? Tell us in the comments box your own hat history, gardening story, or Kentucky Derby story – or anything else that sets us up for summer.
 

  

How To Tie A Scarf And Other Essential Life Knowledge

Spring is coming a little early here

In honor of Leap Day, we’ll be leaping from thought to thought in this post.  I’m sure you’ll land on something that fits you.

This has been a hit or miss week for me online.  Muscles that haven’t been used in months since even before my surgery have been spasming and rebelling as I return to exercise.  On Monday my physical therapist and I decided that 2.5 mph is the fastest I should go on the treadmill if I don’t want my back to seize up.  My 13-year old dog walks faster than that!  What all this means is I can’t sit at the computer for too long, hence missing blog posts.

I’m preparing to head off to the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference in Chicago this week.  Just me and 8000 other word geeks.  I hope to post on my blog while there (pray for mild Chicago weather).  That’s why today’s post will be short and sweet.  Organizing and packing to do.

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My 50/50 Challenge is moving along.  I’ve finished Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine.  Weiner has been a foreign correspondent for NPR and other outlets.  He is the prototypical curmudgeon, yet he is a fantastic observer of people.  Like his previous book, The Geography of Bliss, he travels the world in search of answers to basic questions.  In this case, after a health scare he begins to question which spiritual foundation he wants to offer his young daughter.  He protests (sort of) at abortion clinics with Franciscan monks, twirls with Sufi dervishes, and cross-dresses at a Raëlian convention.  He even delves into the Jewish roots he had ignored most of his life.  As a “spiritual voyeur,” he takes us across the globe and deep into the questions of what we are looking for when we seek a spiritual life.  And he does it all with respect for the people he encounters and a wicked sense of humor.  Read it for the travel.  Read it for the laugh-out-loud humor.  Read it to find your own answers to the questions he asks.

Click here to see where I am in the challenge.
 

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Here are posts that gave me pause this week.

Blogger/writer Julie Hedlund took the words right out of my mouth last week with “Open Plea to Bloggers: Kick CAPTCHA’s, Word Verification to the Curb.”  I know spam can be a problems for bloggers, but they need to ask themselves if they might be driving away comments from readers who are more casual readers.  Let the spam filters do their jobs.  As for me, more than once I’ve decided not to leave comments when the squiggly words were too much trouble to figure out. 

Becky Green Aaronson brought the Holstee Manifesto to my attention recently and I thank her.  It’s a more modern play on “Just Do It.” The directive to “stop over analyzing” hit home for me.  I went searching for the origin of the manifesto, so you can read the story here.

Nadine Feldman gives us women one more thing to worry about as we age in “It Ain’t the Hot Flashes.”

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Here is my two best finds of the week (drum roll please).  Remember this photo from High Line Park I posted from my New York trip?  Read the story behind the smiling face.

And this is a “must bookmark” video for all those fashion forward types.  Watch “25 Ways to Tie a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes” from Wendy’s Look Book.  I will watch this a million times until I’ve memorized every one.  In France all the women (and many men) wear them winter or summer and do it so effortlessly.  Now I’ll have their little secrets.

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So tell me, now that you have this video do you think you’ll join the scarf club?  What’s your favorite fashion statement or one you wish you could pull off?  Have you seen the Holstee Manifesto before?  What’s your favorite part of it?  Read any good books lately?  Share all your thoughts in the comments box.

Time For the Christmas Feast

This was Christmas Eve in 2010.  It's not so cold or so beautiful this year.

My lead-up to the holiday this year has been slow.  All the annoying bumps in the road for surgery recovery have seemed finally to even out, so this week I’ve been going full tilt at completing decorations and cooking.  My mom’s strawberry bread and fudge have already been made once and distributed for gifts.  Now it’s time for round 2 for the family.  Last night my son’s girlfriend, Laurie, and I made two large casserole pans of my mom’s chicken casserole for the family Christmas Eve meal.  There are more cookies to bake today for the family gathering so that night before Christmas can be left to wrapping presents.

If you asked me what my favorite gifts were over the years, I would be hard pressed to rattle them off like men reciting baseball statistics.  For me, Christmas has always been about the food.  My family is not the sort to serve a traditional Christmas meal of roasted turkey or ham with all the trimmings served on white lace tablecloths with festive candles filling the room.  From my very first memory of Christmas, it has always been my Granny’s spaghetti, first created because there were so many mouths to feed at the family gathering each year.  It took years for anyone to write the recipe down.  When my Aunt Nancy followed her around the kitchen for that purpose she had trouble getting it right because Granny would wander into the kitchen later and add something else when no one was watching.  Through group collaboration we finally got it down on paper (the secret ingredient is bacon).

The reason for the season

Christmas is also not Christmas without my Grandma’s strawberry cookies.  You may ask what’s so Christmas-like about strawberry cookies.  Nothing, except that is when Grandma made them.  She was not a big cookie maker – more a pie kind of baker – but each December she went through the painstaking process of cooking the mixture of dates and sugar and pecans and butter that formed the basis of this treat.  When it had cooled she sat in front of the TV and spent the afternoon molding spoonfuls of the sweet concoction into the shape of a strawberry, then rolling it in red sugar and carefully creating a green leaf at the large end with a can of Betty Crocker’s icing in a can.  They were as bright and beautiful as Christmas neon.  One year after serving as her strawberry assistant I submitted her recipe to a Christmas cookie contest for the newspaper.  It won an honorable mention and a photo, but the food editors felt that they knew better and rolled the cookie concoction in multi-colored sprinkles instead of red sugar.  I suppose it worked for some, but the brilliant red and green gifts from Grandma’s hands were what made the Christmas table.

So as you sit down to share a meal with family and friends at the end of this year, whether Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s or other special occasion remember all you’ve been given this year.  Remember all who are not with you.  And give a special thought to all who suffer and are alone at this time of the year.  I wish you all the best and I’ll be back to regular posting after the New Year.  I’ve got some eating to do now.

I know I should have had photos of culinary creations today, but I just couldn’t get it done.  But stories about them are just as tasty.  What is your favorite food from family holidays?  You can think outside the Christmas season if you want and tell us about barbecue at Labor Day or latkes at Hanukkah or any family food that comes around only rarely and brings memories with it.  Please share in the comments box.

Skyler with her present from last year.  I think I'll just wrap it and
give it to her again this year.

You Must Read:  This fall two blogging friends have published books that you must rush out and buy now to read during the cold nights of January.  Kristin Espinasse, of the French Word A Day blog, has recently published Blossoming in Provence.  It’s another in her series of books with photographs and stories about her life as an American raising two French children and adjusting to life at a Provence vineyard with her French husband.  She has a wonderful eye for the scenes of France that she translates both with her camera lens and her words.

The other book you want to read is The Foreign Language of Friends, by Nadine Feldman.  It tells the story of four very different women brought together in a Spanish class but who find they learn more than the language with this chance encounter.  It’s for anybody who has faced a transition in their lives and have to choose a path.  Nadine’s blog, A Woman’s Nest, shares thoughts and suggestions on travel in the world and into a life of creativity and joy.

Read another story about our Christmas vacation that wasn’t.  Sometimes the best times are when nothing happens.

 

Tipping My Hat to Some Thoughts on Reinvention

Hat stores abound in Dijon, France

Today you are being sent to read something better than I could have written, even though it says exactly what I would want to say.

This week has been a difficult one at the computer.  I’ve had problems with my arm, shoulder, and neck for a long time and next week I go under the knife to see if they can be improved.  This has been a week of spasming, tingling, and other ailments that made it difficult to type for long or work a mouse.  As I was wondering how I was going to get through a blog entry, I clicked on a new piece posted by Nadine Feldman on her site, A Woman’s Nest.

She writes about transformation, travel, creativity and all kinds of things good for the soul.  This week she talked about a hat, a hat and how what the world sees changes how we see ourselves.  With wonderfully poetic language she wrote about how we so easily let others limit us.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be so unencumbered by others' images of us?

If I were to choose one thing that fences me in, that puts me in a box, it it's probably my genes.  I think I’m genetically predisposed to put everyone and everything else first.  It seems to be a trait handed down in the DNA of the women in my family.  I wake up almost every day and say, “What needs to be done?  Who needs what?”  It’s hard to imagine a different sense of self like Nadine describes if I don’t take time to ask what I want and how I’ll get there.  I can’t reinvent myself if I give all my time to making sure someone else achieves what he or she wants.  I’m trying to work on it, to find a balance between me and “them.”

So today I’m sending you over to read Nadine’s post because she wrote exactly what I’d like to say if I had as much insight and mastery of the language as she does.  Enjoy.

You can find it here:  Sometimes It’s More Than a Hat

Be sure to leave a comment on her page to let her know you stopped by.  Then come back here and let us know what you feel limits you from the outside.

Maybe one day I'll be bold enough to think I deserve to wear gladiator sandals

 

Make New Friends . . .

It's always great to find new friends during the dog days of summer

Will they like me?  Will anyone talk to me?  I feel like a kid on her first day in a new school.

When I stopped teaching about ten years ago my biggest fear, though hard to articulate, was that I’d never be able to make any new friends.  With college, graduate school and career I had been on a single track with a lot of other people who shared a similar passion.  Life was beautiful.  Conversations were lively.  I knew all the ropes.

Leaving the academic world, however, left me hanging.  First, I fretted, how would I ever find a new passion?  Second, would I ever be able to find a community as invigorating as the one I left behind?  Such is the plight of those of us redefining our lives more than halfway through our adulthood.  Who would welcome me at their lunch table?

After ramping up my writing ambitions and lurching along with my blog, I’d now like to recognize some people who are more than happy to share their fruit cups and Ding Dongs with me.

What a surprise this week when I opened up my computer one morning to find a message from my new blogging friend, Annette Gendler, telling me I had won a Leibster blog award.  Moi?  I had only recently gotten serious at the endeavor.  As she explained it, the award is to connect bloggers, especially those whose readers consist mainly of family and two best friends from high school (i.e., those with fewer than 200 followers).

If I accept the award, she told me, I must:


* Show my thanks to the blogger who gave me the award by linking back


* Make my own top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.


* Post the award on my blog.


* Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the internet—other writers.


* And best of all – have fun and spread the karma.

I am going to bend the rules a little and not verify the 200 limit because . . . well, because.  So here are my five people you need to give love to:

Memoir, Writing, and Life (Annette Gendler) – I'm sending the love back to Annette.  Without fail three times a week she offers up the best information about the business side of writing and invaluable writing tips.  It’s like a free graduate program in writing.  Plus, she’s an Iron Woman because she continued to post without fail while on a road trip across the American West with her kids (go look at the pictures).  She doesn’t live that far away.  I really need to drive north one day.

A Woman’s Nest (Nadine Feldman) – She’s off hiking in the Swiss Alps right now, but there’s plenty to read on her blog.  She always writes with enthusiasm, making the rest of us feel like writing or other challenges we definitely can conquer, even if we started so late.  She’s all about the world leading a creative and joyful life.

Leah’s Thoughts (Leah Singer) – essayist, recipe-sharer, motivator for those in midlife transitions, and Tweeter.  Following her gives me so many ideas of how to get this writing thing done and keep it fresh.  She recently earned recognition for the food writing part of her blog, but the rest is worth it as well.  I’m thankful for her kind comments about my own writings.

Monica’s Tangled Web (Monica Medina) – She welcomed me into the serious blogging community on She Writes from day one and is always there to answer any stupid question I have about blogging, tweeting, mastering the whole social media thing. She is a serious Cavalier King Charles Spaniel lover.  You can now also find her on Huffington Post.  Variety, thy name is Monica.  One day we’ll actually meet at a BlogHer conference.

Catharsis (Laura Miriam) – I’ve only recently started following Laura, and ya’ll should, too.  She’s Erma Bombeck for the 21st century with posts on parenting, her teaching gig, life absurdities in general. “Not the Average Mommy Blog” is right.  Her writing is laugh-out-loud funny and reminds me that I should lighten up in my writing style – and in my life.  So I give this award not because of any memorable writing advice she’s given me, personally (hey, we’ve only been dating a couple of weeks), but because of what I think I can learn if I keep watching.  Somebody should give this woman a book deal.

So when you finish reading this post, click on over and read some of the masters.  Thanks to all they give me.  Thanks for welcoming the new kid on the block.

And certainly in the comments section, feel free to nominate your own favorites we need to be reading.

A little something to cool you off on this steamy Labor Day Weekend