The Burrow

..... this morning, from the pool, I saw two military fighter planes (where is Big Cuter when I need him, he who could identify all sorts of these things pre-pre-school?) flying in close formation.  .... this afternoon, typing to you at my desk, I am watching a helicopter make its second revolution between my house and the Pusch Ridge. .... this morning, raising my eyes from the keyboard, I saw a hummingbird drink lustily from the yuccas along the pathway.  .... at noontime, in the car with TBG on our way to lunch with A+ companions, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. .... yesterday, on the way home, nearing our neighborhood , enduring a new-and-unneeded road expansion project, we were greeted by a crane towering twenty thirty forty-stories really high overhead. That's just twenty-four hours of upward observations.  I don't remember doing much of that when I was young; there just wasn't that much up to look at.  Houses were closer together and so ...

It was a race car kind of weekend here in the desert Southwest.  The temps were in the low 90's and the breeze was wafting through the open windows and I was in and out, to the gym and in the garden and to the grocery store and then another grocery store and all the while TBG was watching shiny cars go round and round and round and round.  I had to take out my hearing aids when I stopped by his perch in front of the tv; the droning of the tires on the track was more than my poor brain could handle. With cameras inside the cockpits and mounted on the outside of the cars as well, it's possible to hypnotize oneself ... at least it was for me.  I sat there mesmerized, watching the driver's hands on the steering wheel and feeling the vibrations of the tires on the track through his gloves and into my head.  This is not resting-my-hands-in-the-bottom-loop-of-my-wheel driving.  This is serious, hands at 10 and 2, thick fire retardant gloves driving.  The wh...

Life Well Lived wants to know about my favorite relaxation techniques for this week's expert's panel discussion .  I had to laugh when the invitation arrived in my inbox.  Relaxation and I have an interesting - some would say antagonistic - relationship.  No one who knew me before I got shot could have imagined that I would be capable of lying still on a couch for 12 weeks.  No one.  You didn't even have to know me.  You could have watched me from afar and made the same deduction: this is not person who sits still. My mother-in-law, the world's most wonderful mother-in-law whose example I aim to follow scrupulously, Nannie, called it sucrrying .  " Just listen to her scurrying around up there," she'd smile at TBG as she listened to my feet racing down the hall from the bathroom to Auntie Em's bedroom in which I sought refuge, thanking G'ma for insisting that I bring a bathrobe along on my first visit to his parents' house .  I carried h...

My traditional Memorial Day post, tweaked just a bit from previous years. Thanks, as always, to those who serve. ***** I used to march in the Memorial Day parade. I was dressed in my Brownie uniform, and then in my Girl Scout uniform - replete with those hated anklets. I wore them because they said you couldn't march without them and marching was too cool to pass up, but the shame............ All the school bands marched too, and Benjamin Road provided the materials and the labor to make the capes the high school kids wore. There must have been a military presence there, but I didn't pay enough attention to notice. I was marching and I knew that, all over America, other kids were being Americans and marching, too. It was great. In Marin, the Memorial Day parade was always good for a controversy or two. Or three. Should the anti-war protesters walk alphabetically in the main march, or have their own march, or walk 50 yards behind the official march? I especia...

Last year's blooms were anemic; a dry monsoon season and a frigid winter conspired against a vivid display.  This year, with two seasons' blossoms stored up inside, the trees were thicker than ever, the saguaro's had more buds, and the detritus is covering my front yard in piles of rapidly decaying but stubbornly resistant yellowness.  When most of America is lubricating lawn mowers, I am looking for an outdoor vacuum cleaner with a low setting.  ***** The waitress at lunch today spent more time curling her hair than boning up on the menu.  Her blonde curls were perfection, long, loose ringlets that draped elegantly down her back and over one carefully tilted shoulder.  She ended her description of one dish with thusly: " ...and some other stuff." My companion and I shrugged our shoulders and continued making one another smile. ***** A cousin-in-law had a near brush with disaster and I wasted no time in chiming in.  Was I too intrusive?  Was I ...

I have a lot of books.  Actually, I used to have a lot of books and now I have the best of that lot.  The whole thing makes me antsy.  We had a library and a living room lined with bookshelves in Chicago.  We moved to northern California and found houses with big windows and high ceilings and expansive vistas..... but no wall space and certainly no bookshelves.  Californians live outdoors; there wasn't a lot of emphasis on the life of the mind, it seemed. I installed shelving in every home; my books took pride of place. Downsizing and moving, once again, I vowed that I would not pay movers to transport volumes I never would read again.  That plan failed as I, once again, underestimated the time and energy required to pack up two lives (and the detritus of two other lives whose owners were living elsewhere but whose possessions seemed destined to stay, forever and forever, with their parental units).  By the time the movers came to pack up the k...

For years, I've teased TBG for his obsession with The Bachelor.  It started when Little Cuter was in college; her addiction to the show drew him in instantly.  Like watching a train wreck in slow motion,  they would dissect and inspect and judge the contestants.  This one was creepy, that one was odd, those needed personalities and the one who went home had serious issues.  He found it to be a window into her soul. We listened, fascinated, as she learned lessons from the idiocy on the screen.  Despite the nails-on-a-blackboard quality of the show, I enjoyed their conversations the morning after.  Why did she.... how could he.... what if they.... she was working out her own issues while watching reality tv. For the most part, the show left them feeling quite smug.  Neither of them would fall for that line.  Nobody would expect them to believe that .  If someone said those words to her, she'd turn and head for the hills.  Obvious...

There's a lot to love about my little girl.  Just ask her fiance; he'll be glad to share.  So will her mother-in-law-to-be..... and her brother.... and her co-workers....and I. I'll share the morning I complimented her matching attire. Before I could get the orange juice on the table she had been up and down the stairs, switching her socks and her skirt and there she was, hair going every which way, her eyes frantic as she begged me to reassure her that this was better, that nothing went together anymore.  She was choosing her own clothes and dressing herself; I honestly didn't care what the pre-school teachers thought.  The other parents might look askance, but their children flocked to her side.  In first grade she came home flummoxed and out of sorts.  The girls in her class had made up a list to take the guess work out of who would get to sit next to Little Cuter at lunch.  Another child might have been flattered; my girl was annoyed.  D...

I'm really really glad that Little Cuter and SIR are not being married this afternoon.  Though there's a breeze, the temperatures are likely to hit triple digits.  The sun, recovered from its eclipse, has that summertime thing going on.  In short, it's hot. Not muggy humid sticky hot, like you feel on a July afternoon in Chicago.  Not foot scorching toe burning sandy hot, like Jones Beach in August.  Not the why won't the fan move the air enough hot of my grandmother's stuffy apartment.  No, not any hot like those at all. This is the hot that bakes you from the inside out.   This kind of hot makes your bones feel warm and toasty, as if you're walking around with your own personal heating pad, one molded perfectly to the contours of your self.  Nothing is swollen or sticky.  It's just hot. This is the hot that your hair feels.  It's down to the roots and out to the tips hot, wet at the sweaty parts but otherwise just radiating ...

I was always fast.  I was never an athlete.  Jewish girls from New York had no sports role models, at least as far as I can recall.  My parents thought that Sports Night, my high school's girls vs girls color war, was vaguely reminiscent of Nazi training games.   I never understood that analogy, though I heard it often enough.  It certainly took a lot of the fun out of my participation, though.  Of that I am sure. In sixth grade, I won a trophy at the L'ag B'omer track meet sponsored by a consortium of synagogues and held at a local high school.  The only music we heard was the Israeli national anthem.  Someone ought to explain to me the playing of national anthems before sporting events.  Maybe my parents were right; perhaps they are nationalistic displays disguised as athletic competitions.  At the time, I was just amazed that I crossed the finish line first.  I looked for my parents in the stands.... and the...

Her hair is longer than I've ever seen it on her head.  As a girl, her mom turned her auburn curls into Shirley Temple ringlets that fell down her back, impressing her friends and causing a minor uproar at home.  Her dad was a committed Socialist and wondered why his little girl was trying to be more special than all the other little girls in the neighborhood.  She remembers the argument.  She also remembers loving her curls. As a young woman, posing for photos with her going-off-to-war brother, the shop owner asked if he could take one just of her.  He wanted it for the display in his window.  She remembers being surprised by herself every time she walked past the store.  Putting herself out there was not her style. Enjoying the celebrity was not how she spent her days. Still, she sits up a little straighter and smiles just a little brighter when she looks at this photo, some seventy years after it was taken She was a stunner.  There's n...

I'm sorry, Katniss.  I really am.  I underestimated you and your author.  You've gotten under my skin. I didn't realize that your author was writing for teens,  I saw New York Times Bestseller  on the back cover and I just assumed it was the real list.  Then I went to the interweb and saw that there were a jillion NYT Bestseller lists so I gave up and read the back cover more closely and saw what I'd missed the first time. I still don't know why teen lit has to write down to its audience.  I don't know why good grammar and an extensive vocabulary are absent.  I don't understand .... and maybe I'm not supposed to understand.  I'm not a teen in the 21st century.  When I was a teen, the genre didn't exist. I participated in an Adolescent Literature Book Club (it was much too serious to be referred to as a Teen Lit Book Club) for a while when we were in Marin and my kids were of that age.  Big Cuter was reading above grade level.....

Traveling makes for some odd experiences.  It takes its toll on digestion and sleep patterns and reading habits. Reading habits, you ask?  Books are books.... they travel well.... they fit in a purse and they exist in the ether on my Kindle Fire.  Why should my physical location have anything to do with that?  My problem is that I never remember to take them along when I leave the hotel in the morning. Big Cuter's apartment is a 20 minute walk downhill from the Marriott we're funding with our Reward Points.  Before I was shot, I hiked it happily and easily.  Now, with the hills presenting a challenge I've not faced in the flatlands of Tucson, taxicabs or Zipcars move my achy body from Union Square to the Tenderloin.  It really is a dry heat in the desert; the humidity in Baghdad by the Bay is making its presence felt with every step I take here. Leaving at 10am and returning at 10pm requires more planning than I've been able to manage this trip. ...

He's always been a student. Since his first minutes on the planet, Big Cuter's eyes have been open and searching.  Born "sunny side up," he was looking around the delivery room, wondering what he'd missed while passing through the birth canal.  The doctor and nurse were amazed. He looked curious. A reluctant reader until necessity (Dad wasn't around to read Princess of Mars  and he wanted to know how it ended) forced his hand, his apartment now contains a bed, a couch, a chair and books.  Lots and lots and lots of books.  Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson and Michael Lewis and J.K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin share the bookshelves with Patrick O'Brian and Tom Clancy and his law texts.  This is a kid who loves to read.  He just came to it later than made me comfortable. Letting go of expectations - he never crawled, he stood up and ran - has been the hardest part of parenting for me.  I like to know the rules, see the path, have a plan. ...

A black man sits in the Oval Office and tells a reporter that he is comfortable with men marrying men.  America is a wonderful country, isn't it? ***** I threw a yellow towel in with my light colored laundry.  It was sitting on the kitchen counter and I thought, why not. I'll tell you why not -   the seams of the white shirts are now permanently dyed yellow, my khaki shorts now have yellow pockets and my sports bras are puke-colored instead of pure white. Remind me never to do that again, please. ***** It looked like you could walk atop the pool this morning.  The yellow blossoms (see yesterday's post) had covered the water completely.  When the filter turned on at 7am, I could almost hear it groaning. ***** We must have a road runner nest nearby.  For the first time since we've moved here I've seen a Geococcyx furiously pecking at the mini-meals hidden within my rocky ground cover.  They are funny looking things, for whom flying doesn't seem...

I'd been to Tucson in the 1980's, staying for a weekend at Canyon Ranch with TBG.  We exercised and spa'ed and ate ourselves silly.  We bicycled on paved road to Loew's Ventana Canyon resort, where we drank fruity slushies - which now we'd call smoothies - before we trekked back on the pavement to our other manicured home away from home.  If we were in the desert, we certainly didn't know it. When we flew to Phoenix 6 years ago this week, we were definitely in the desert.  The ride to our hotel took us past perfectly landscaped highways, meticulously maintained and sparsely planted with the weirdest looking cacti I'd ever seen.  Who knew that cacti bloomed?  Not I. Who knew that those flowers were red and yellow and white and coral and peach and burgundy?  Definitely not I. Today, I live in the desert and have grown to appreciate the yellow season.  Only in Tucson would folks roll down their car windows when the temperatures were in the mid-90...

A piece I stole from Michelle's Facebook page.... be sure to read today's main post, too.

wereaditlikethis.blogspot.com I heard about Maurice Sendak's death on the radio, driving to one of my therapies.  I try to find a positive frame of mind on these trips; sometimes that's easier than others.  NPR was chirping on and on about his life and work;  I heard none of it.  I was on the floor with The Cuters, everyone smelling newly bathed and feeling snuggle-worthy, watching anatomically correct Mickey fall through the dark and out of his clothes and into The Night Kitchen. The naked little boy was surprising to the kids the first time they saw him.  After that, he was just Mickey. tvtropes.org And then there was Max, mighty, brave, beast-defying Max, who turned lemons into lemonade Where The Wild Things were. Mom could send him to bed without supper but he didn't mind.  He took himself someplace wonderful and wasn't bothered when the beasties roared their terrible roars .  Neither were we, leaning against Big Cuter's bunk beds,...

Ellen, pilates instructor extraordinaire, is bone-on-bone.  Her orthopedist says she needs her hip replaced.  She has an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon next week.  She has made plans for a substitute teacher during her recuperation.  She has total confidence in her physicians.  She's sad.  She's mad.  She's infuriated.  She's confused.  She's determined.  She's annoyed. She's all of those things at the same time.  She's crying in Italian restaurants.  She's sharing her angst with me because I get it.  It's like listening to myself. We are active, speedy, fit women.  We define ourselves as such.  When the body - through normal wear and tear or extraordinary interactions with bullets -  decides to throw a monkey wrench in our plans, we find ourselves moaning that (she) won't be able to hike the Grand Canyon or (me) carry grandchildren.  It just doesn't seem. right fair appropriate congruent...