Trip to Orange County CA

President Reagan is said to have observed that when Republicans die they go to Orange County. I sort of doubt this, but Wade dearly wanted to go to college in California (Pomona), and has lived within three miles of the coast ever since, most of it in Orange County. Now he and his family (Joyce and 2 sons) live in Fountain Valley, and Orange County seems like a little bit of heaven when one feels the cool breezes and gazes at the lovely landscapes in the neighborhoods and along the coast.

Agapanthus - Fountain Valley

Zachary and Cody

Zachary. The firstborn grandchild always has a special place in one’s heart and Zachary is the first of our 4 grandsons. Now he is 13 and growing up. It was a thrill to have Zachary meet me in the baggage claim area, looking broader of shoulder and taller than he was at Thanksgiving, and lift the big clumsy red bag off the carousel with ease.

Zachary goes for a layup

Both Zachary and Cody are in the GATE classes at their schools. (Whatever that means. I guess that the curriculum is supposed to be more advanced or more enriched than ordinary classroom programs.) But a major focus in Zachary’s life has always been sports: Taekwondo, soccer, swimming, volleyball and now BASKETBALL. Basketball is Zachary’s favorite sport at school. This summer his coach has him practicing with the high school ninth graders, although they are all taller than he is.
Zachary is also taking advanced woodworking next year.  His shop teacher says he has an extraordinary skill with detail.

He plays ping pong against his dad and brother.

Zachary is also doing things for his family now such as getting the trash out on trash day and washing his mom’s car.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cody.
 
 
Cody (age 9) has always loved video games.  However, playing video games doesn't make interesting copy or photographs.  Here Cody awaits Zachary's serve.
 
 
 
 
 
He is on the subdivision swim team as is Zachary.
Here his dad secures his swim suit.
Both boys won a race  and lost a race at the neighborhood swim meet.
 
 
 
 
 

 

Cody was interested in making a snake out of a tie, a la Alice Baird and Locke.  Above Cody peruses Alice's blog about Locke and making the snake.
 
On the right is Cody with his tie snake  We used a pipe cleaner for the tongue and put the goggle eyes on with rubber cement.  Neither eyes nor tongue stayed put.
 
 
 
 
 Doing Things with  Zach and Cody.

After telling my friends I wasn't focused enough to finish a Monopoly game, I managed to devote  3 hours to a game which Zachary finally won, although I was very happy to come in second as I am usually last.
That's Wade's disembodied hand in the picture.

Mom Joyce took us to the Science Museum in Santa Ana.   Here the kids are in Predators Plaza on a treasure hunt.

 Cody examines a bead sorting machine.

Another day they took me to one of my favorite places:  Huntington Beach.  We ate breakfast at the Sugar Shack (pancakes for me - yum yum) and walked on the pier.

All in all, the whole family spoiled me.
Besides a trip to Huntington Beach, Joyce took me shopping at Westminister Mall, and Zachary helped me pick out a tee while Joyce brought the car around to the mall door (more spoiling). 
While Joyce and the boys went to a family memorial service in Reedley on Saturday, Wade took me to a Cirque de la Symphonie concert with the Pacific Symphony at the amplitheater in Orange County.  The acrobatics who performed to popular classics were thrilling. My favorite act was an acrobat who seemed to fly around the stage with beautiful burgundy curtains fluttering in the wind like wings. I also loved the woman beside me who  cried,  'Wow!  Wow!" as the performers did their tricks.

The Fourth of July in Egypt

This Fourth of July I was looking at pictures I had taken over the years in Egypt. I remembered a number of July Fourths spent in Cairo when we attended the American Embassy sponsored Independence Day celebrations on the Cairo American College campus. (Cairo American College is an international K-12 school, allegedly established by petroleum companies to educate the children of petroleum workers in Egypt. The children of employees of many embassies, including American, attend there. However, the children from East European embassies often attended the school where I taught: The American International School. It was cheaper, although still pretty expensive.)

The celebration took place in Cairo’s summer heat. Cairo Egyptians, those who can, leave for Alexandria in July. Many of my students and their families spent summers touring the States or shopping the capitals of Europe. However, some Americans stayed in Cairo and even went out in the noonday sun, at least on the Fourth of July. Of course, even then we had to go through Security (basically a metal detector) to get into the campus grounds.

For the first few years this celebration was a nostalgic return to Americana. Embassy employees (the men) would grill bratwurst and the embassy women sold acres of homemade apple, cherry (my favorite), a variety of berry pies, as well as coconut and chocolate cream. There were also cakes, breads and cookies. You could buy the whole loaf of banana bread (Egypt has the sweetest bananas in the world), or a dozen cookies and take them home, or just buy one slice of pie. I usually bought a slice of pie, because, as you know, I would be tempted to eat the whole pie by the end of the day, if I took it home.

Here is my water bottle carrier.  My only momento.

There were many tents selling art work, scenes of Egypt, calendars, and books. Egyptians and ex-pats made items such as jewelry, vests, and t-shirts or cylindrical bags for a liter of water with logos commemorating the day and year of celebration.
 For security reasons, we didn’t have fireworks. We would meet a few stalwart friends there. Most young American teachers would have left for the summer. Even teachers who no longer owned homes in the United States would leave soon after July Fourth, if they hadn’t left in June, to spend time with relatives in the USA.

Later the celebrations changed dramatically when KFC, Bascom Robbins, McDonald’s, Chili’s, and other American chains were successfully established in Egypt. On Independence Day, they would set up concessions that were mobbed by the crowds, especially the Egyptian employees of the American Embassy. The concessions quickly ran out of food, and the ice cream was soup. The whole atmosphere was quite commercialized. At this point it became disappointment to attend.

The Two Item Food Rule

Our  Circle of Friends church group of women - older women, because younger women are generally at work or home with children - meet on the fourth Thursday each month, except for November and December, at someone or another’s house. The whole idea is to talk and have an enjoyable time without having to anything to show for it. Generally, the hostess has a number of delicious food selections to offer from dips to fruits in season, cheeses, coffee cakes, bundt cakes, etc.

Several years ago,  my turn to entertain came right after my son, Sharif (in Japan) and his family canceled their plans to come to the USA at the last minute. I had a freezer full of bundt cake, cookies, and coffee cake and I decided to serve all items to my church group. The spread so intimidated them that they made a rule that the hostess should serve only two food items.

Since then, that rule has been violated more than observed, but at least hostesses don’t feel that they have to go 'whole hog' with food. However, this month our member Bonnie totally disregarded both the spirit and letter of the rule. First, she had a huge watermelon carved like a basket containing, of course, watermelon balls.

The jars with red tops contain little lights like fireflies that glitter on the crystals in the jar bottoms. Her table spread included little lemon sandies, little cheese and ham sandwiches, brownie squares with a chocolate filling and spinach cheese balls.

She also served a refreshing watermelon punch.

Also coffee, of course.

A lovely time was had by all.

Raccoon - Second Verse

The ghost raccoon is ghost no longer. For a couple of nights I observed him eat the birdseed from the feeder after I had previously rescued the suet cake. I thought, “Why worry about a few missing seeds from the bird feeder?” I thought again when I found the bird feeder on the ground in the morning, very much the worse for the wear. Although decidedly whopper jawed, it was still workable, so I replenished the seed (Boy! That raccoon knows how to clean a feeder.) and hung the feeder on the outside of the deck again. I now retrieve both suet cake and bird feeder each night. Since I don’t want to surprise the raccoon in a bad mood as I recover the suet and feeder, I bang on an aluminum pie pan to scare him (hopefully) away, if he happens to be on deck. So far I have beaten him to the larder.

To get his picture, and satisfy my husband that I am feeding all comers, I left a little pile of birdseed on the deck near the stairs. He was quite oblivious to the deck light, the camera flash or me as I took his picture from the door.

Suet Cake, Grackles, and the Ghost Raccoon

I am a feeder of the birds around our house. I love to feed the song birds on our deck.

For woodpeckers or chickadees I hang the wire suet feeder with it’s plastic box upside down to discourage the grackles from eating it. Supposedly, they can’t get to the suet if it’s only open on the bottom, but they sure try hard enough. Woodpeckers and chickadees are able to fed on the suet, but they don’t come as often as the grackles.

Earlier in the spring, I hadn’t seen any grackles in weeks, so I figured they weren’t in the neighborhood. I hung the naked suet in a feeder designed to be used by large woodpeckers. A grackle scout must have been near by, because within hours those nasty black birds had arrived and demolished the suet cake. For two days after that two grackle fledglings stood on the deck rail by the empty holder begging their parents to be fed.

Grackles aren’t my only problem. My other problem is our ghost raccoon that I have never seen. . He (or she) has devoured several cakes of suet that I’ve put out for the birds. At night he lifts the cake in the wire feeder off the hook on the railing and eats it there on the deck. In the morning, I find an empty wire feeder, a clean plastic container and his greasy footprints all over the deck and down the steps.

I wait a number of days after he has eaten one cake before I put out another one, but it still disappears. Apparently, he comes every night, and checks for the cake.. My sister-in-law, living a few blocks away, suggested that I bring the suet in at night. I now try to remember to do that.

I came outside this morning and found that he had tipped over our plastic two-gallon watering can spilling the water over the deck. No harm done, but I wondered if he had taken revenge against me for bringing the suet cake into the house last night.

Of course there are the squirrels…..

My husband has no sympathy for my selective largess. He feels that it’s only fair that if I feed one kind of animal, I should feed them all. Hmmm. Life’s not fair, is it?

Jane Austen and Teapots

People often ask me what we do year after year at Jane Austen meetings. We do discuss one or more of her six published novels periodically, as well as her unpublished novel, Lady Susan or her unfinished novel Sanditon. On the other hand, we have programs concerning the fashion, culture, and politics of her time (approximately 1775-1820) including the history, making and serving of tea.

So it should surprise no one that at our April meeting we discussed teapots. One member of our group, Virginia, collects all sorts of teapots, and several others had teapots they wanted to show off, so we had a grand time.

When we scheduled this program, I knew I would love it, but I wondered how popular it would be with our general membership…the English professors and other academic types. However, we had a big group, around twenty. Several visitors heard about our topic and asked to come. Several of the men members came, some whom had not come in a long time.

Virginia showed us her collection of teapots that ran from the sublime to the ridiculous, from tiny to large,
silver, porcelain, and pottery.

Here Virginia betrays some political inclinations for which we will surely make allowances.  Notice the teapot made of ceramic asparagus and the one shaped like a head of lettuce.

 Lorna's bacchanalian teapot was selected by her husband  when they were in Italy, in their youth, as she was browsing through a tea shop. 

Here Carol shows it off to the delight of the character behind her.  Be sure to click on the picture to get the full impact.

Pamela is showing off an elaborate tea cozy.

Here is a better view of the tea cozy.  The sweet flowered white teapot is the more standard selection that Lorna made in the Italian tea room. 

I brought a teapot that I had bought near Aswan in Egypt from a Bedouin merchant in a tent, while we were waiting to board the ferry to go to Philae Island to see the Temple of Isis.

 
 

 

 I want you to appreciate just how tiny some of  Virginia's tea sets are.
 
 
 



Finally, Virginia served delicious refreshments using
one of her lovely tea services.

 
All of these pictures, except the Bedouin teapot which I photographed at home, were taken by Dennie.  And I ecstatically thank him for letting me share them with you.