guilty pleasures......

ok, so i am a bit late coming clean about the first monday evening spent without olympic coverage......having little to choose from while walking on the treadmill i settled for skating with the stars.......oy.......maybe i didn't get enough of the really good skaters and needed a fix.......now that the show's run is near to completion, the really bobbling 'stars' have been booted....and the ones that remain appear to be surprisingly agile.....i am not so vested in the process as to be able to recall any of the particular people......just that nobody took blood-letting falls and that there were some elegant moments.....who knew?.........and then i got caught up in the finale of a bachelor in paris.......this somewhat predictably fluff of a series whereupon a ER doctor from nashville had his pick of 25 beauties.....and the cut is down to the last 2.......and being that it took place in paris and surrounds.....well.....it was like a train wreck that i couldn't stop looking at.........i could have told you from the get go- seeing the last contestants....a stunning kindergarten teacher also from nashville and an exotic distribution manager from los angeles......who wouild walk away with the promise of the 2 carat ring........ah well......i did enjoy the parts that took place in the rental apartments that each girl used during the last week of the production.....i could enjoy living in either neighborhood.......last night i watched gilmore girls whilst riding the exercycle, after watching access hollywood whilst walking on the treadmill.......the usual guilty pleasures....i am really sucked into the gilmore girls plot.....there is no explanation that i can offer......i cannot define my attraction.....so much so that i may have to redefine guilt.................

home for lunch.....

ok, so coming home for lunch is a bad idea.......for starts...i am sorely tempted to blow off the 1:30 pm meeting in danville that prompted me to come on home for a bite as it is on my way.......tempted because after my nice 2 hour nap yesterday my body thinks it needs a similar nap this afternoon.......oy......i am tired because i slept badly last night......what with my preferred pillows on the loveseat in plain view.....it was all i could do not to get up and switch them out.....as it was the supposedly floppy pillow has too much height.......i ended up throwing it to the floor at some point....making do with the pillowthatcameinabox and promised to remember my head.......i must have fallen asleep at that point....but did not awake refreshed at all.....curiously, i had 2 different dream sequences.....the first before i woke up and started fretting over the pillows involved a dairymart sort of place, and an argument with a guy who was filling his pepsi mega-cup with ice from the snocone machine.......as if i could care about that?!........and then post-pillow dreams focused on driving around in an unfamiliar neighborhood with a woman who was late for a dinner.....and when we got to the dinner she started having chest pains in the foyer.....and she turned and asked me if i could call her son to go and bring over her infant twin grandsons that she hadn't yet seen, just in case she didn't make it through her heart attack.......and then she calmly walked down the stairs to the dinner table and had a seat.......that was a curious detail in the dream.....the house must have been some sort of split level, as dinner was set up down the steps rather than up the steps......go figure.........and the business of twins that haven't yet been seen......i have no idea where that comes from in my backbrain regions.......the sequence might make an interesting short story if cobbled together by a clever author........speaking of writers and writing.......the quote of the day on my personalized google desktop was "I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street." - Virginia Woolf.....i like the way she thinks.............

greatest hits.....

ok, so i did get a few openable gifts last evening.....a nice bottle of gewurtztraminer from andrew and michelle, and some neil youngs cd's......prairie wind....the one he made in earnest just before he had a brain aneurysym repaired....and a greatest hits cd.......wow...the greatest hits were just that.....carefully selected renditions of his best music....including a 10+ minute version of cowgirl in the sand.......and a version of helpless that i hadn't heard before......very nice.......we listened to it through before i wandered off to bed about 9:00 pm.....i was utterly exhausted....and wanted to get maximum sleep.....as i think i should continue to do now that i am 50......get lots and lots of refreshing sleep......though i get the impression that neil, who is much older than 50......is much too busy for such things as max sleep.......and he is making out just fine..............

more on brokeback mountain.....

ok, so......i do have more to say about the movie.......that i didn't get to say over dinner given that my mother was there and she made it clear that she wasn't about to talk about that movie.....there were touches that i found pleasing/telling about the cowboys....the movie begins with ennis carrying his few belongings in a paper sack.......and there is a critical moment late in the film when he leaves with essentials in another paper sack.......that was such a touching and tender tear-filled moment.......say what you will about the morality of love......that scene was one of genuine love......and supurb acting.....it also illustrated simply how ennis was a man who needed very little, especially with words to express himself, but what he did need he needed deeply......i was moved by the scene where jack shows up from texas after he learns of the divorce....and he gets all mad that ennis won't change his planned weekend with his daughters to go fishing with jack......ennis wasn't about to abandon his children as he himself had been left alone.....yeah,yeah,yeah...not abandoned in the same way....but left alone when he could have been there....ennis couldn't do that......i have seen a few other heath ledger movies.....regretable movies......but his performance was as fine as olivier in this venue......i believe he was a cowboy torn between love for his family and his way of life....and love for the love of his life.................and that would be a hard emotion to fake if you were just a marginal actor............

birthday card of note.....

ok, so....andrew's handwritten addition to the card he and michelle brought:

ok, so
ok, so
50 down
50 to go



that's my boy.........

the morning after....

ok,so......the firm pillow fulfilled it's function to the max.....the floppy pillow had a tad too much loft but i did sleep well....still congested.......but it may be too early to tell as i should probably have the duvet cover dry-cleaned and the rest of the bedding washed until i pass judgement.......wonder if i could just beat the pillow down to regulation thickness before bedtime this evening?........

firm and floppy......

ok, so......i ended up driving to lexington to see brokeback mountain by myself.....one friend was sick and the other couldn't go to the early show that i had to see if i wanted to get back in time for my own birthday supper.....and it worked out well...given that i intended to shop for pillows.....pillow shopping is personal and not intended for public view........especially after such a tragic film......linens and things in hamburg had an entire section dedicated to all things head-support.....feathers, poly, gel-cores, and all manner of fillings........i did find a pillow that came in a box that promises to remember my head.....i was mostly attracted by the weight and firmness.....so similar to my current heavy bottom feather pillow......and then there is the faux feather floppy pillow touted as the perfect thing for stomach sleepers.....it is truly loose and pliant........pricey but perfect........my trip home was made extra mournful by the simulcast of the met opera's performance of samson and delilah.....so very sad to listen to despite my lack of french skills.......and so my guests are leaving (andrew, michelle, grandma).....and i am emotionally spent...with being old, with having to break in new bedding, with the depressing film......with lex traffic......the good news.....my gift entails a trip to nyc to see museums during my middle child's spring break.....all i have to do is to pin down dates/times.......i always function better with a trip to look forward to....

from writer's almanac....february 25

ok, so....this from Garrison Keillor......on this my 50th birthday...

Poem: "When I am gone, recall my hair" by Edith Wharton from Edith Wharton: Selected Poems. © The Library of America.

When I am gone, recall my hair

When I am gone, recall my hair,
Not for the light it used to hold,
But that your tough, enmeshed there,
As turned it to a younger gold.

Recall my hands, that were not soft
Or white or fine beyond expressing,
Till they had slept so long and oft,
So warm and close, in your possessing.

Recall my eyes, that used to lie
Blind pools with summer's wreckage strewn.
You cleared the drift, but in their sky
You hung no image but your own.

Recall my mouth, that knew not how
A kiss is cradled and takes wing,
Yet fluttered like a nest-hung bough
When you had touched it like the Spring.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the "Father of Modern Pathology," Giovanni Battista Morgagni, born in Forli, Italy (1682). He's remembered today for his book On the Seats and Causes of Disease, published in 1761, in which he describes in great detail the results of 640 autopsies he performed on patients who died from diseases. It's considered one of the most important works in the history of medicine. Before Morgagni, it was still widely believed that diseases were caused by an imbalance in four human fluids called humors—phlegm, blood, gall and choler. Morgagni laid the foundation for modern pathology.

It's the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.

He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn't learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they'd come up with would become known as Impressionism.

At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.

The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.

Renoir said, "In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat."

It's the birthday of novelist Karl May, (books by this author) born in Ernstthal, Germany (1842). He was in prison when he began to read about American pioneers and cowboys and Indians and got the idea for a series of novels about the adventures of a heroic German immigrant named Charley and his Apache Indian friend Winnetou. As soon as he published the books, they became hugely popular, especially among German adolescent boys. His novels became some of the most widely read books in Europe.

May's novels are still incredibly popular in Germany. Many of his novels have been made into movies and TV shows, and in northern Germany thousands of people still go to see an annual festival that puts on plays based on May's plots.

It's the birthday of novelist and critic Anthony Burgess, (books by this author) born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England (1917). He had written several novels, none of which was particularly successful, when, in 1959, he began to suffer from severe headaches. He went to see a doctor and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctor told him he only had one year to live.

Burgess wrote five novels in that following year, the year he believed to be his last. The diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. He's best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). It begins: "There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter."

I suppose i appreciate being born on the same day as Renoir than the rest....

hypocrits.......

ok, so i have to weigh in on the big issues......so here it is on the eve of my big day........for the united states government to withhold all monetary support for the legally elected and democratic hamas party in palestine......because they are a terrorist faction....but agree to the takeover of 5 eastern american ports by a dubai company....despite the detail that the 9-11 terrorists were funded through dubai and may have had training ties there............seems a but much to swallow............lets revisit the facts.....we want democracy in the middle east except when we don't like the winner....and we have disdain for terrorists except when they want to run our ports...............well, if dubya says i shouldn't worry (my pretty little head) about port security.........

random olympic moment......

ok, so my friend gail did not meet me at the hub this afternoon at 3:00 as planned.....turns out she quit earlier on......and was not able to make another plan with me.......i did happen to run in to david's parents....a pleasure in that i do not run into them often....and they are such fine folks......these days i appreciate people that i have known for a long time......i recall meeting them at the home of mutual friends when andrew was a baby...and before david was born......but i idgress from the games......i ended up at home before i had intended to be home....and decided to walk on the treadmill.......an activity pleasantly interrupted by birthday greetings from my second born......and when i turned ont he television it was for the ending of the women's 30k cross-country freestyle race......30k=about 18 miles.....byw......and in the lead pack were women from russia, the czech republic, poland and norway....and they all looked just exhausted.....and the woman from poland looked to have the advantage over the favorite from russia and allthesudden the czech willed herself ahead and over the line......and then she collasped onto the snow, followed by the czech( for silver) and the russian( for bronze)...everybody was down.......and then......a little bundle of pink toddled out to her mom ( the gold medal winner)as she lay upon the ground....as if to say....mamma...its over....let's play.......it was a tear-jerker moment........turns out the russian also is a newish mamma.......such a touching bit of reality for friday afternoon television that i won't soon forget.............

music to munch by......

ok, so i am really enjoying my newish sets of songs that i play on my pda while i eat my lunch......which today, for those who keep score, was leftover couscous, stuffed grape leaves, feta, and cucumbers in sour cream and onion......the artic monkeys were first up.....with fakes tales of san francisco.......i like this song.....it takes me back to vintage david bowie.......suffragette city or the like......lots of energy, intriguing lyrics, and some reminiscent phrasing.....gosh, but that song came out in 1976.....i can recall once knowing the lyrics.....i am trying to spent the day feeling 49 to its fullest before facing fifty in the morning.....are there lyrics to feeling 49?......i have a bit of time left on my lunch hour....maybe i could come up with a few lines....

putting two and two together......

ok, so.....i had an epiphany of sorts this afternoon in my thursday county.....the environmentalists were chatting with the front office folks about the epidemic of bedbugs seen in lexington....and the conversation turned to what to do about such things in one's own home....and the specifics were discussed...such as the statute of limitations on bedclothes, including mattress and pillows.....and the suggestion was made that pillows should be replaced every 2-3 years...if for no other reason than the dust, dustmites and other varmits that are attracted to human dander.....yeach!.....and then it dawned on me......i have been using the same down pillows for longer than 2-3 years........to be truthful....i am still using the same pillows (one firm feather pillow and one floppy feather pillow.....floppy goes on top...got it?)......since i left home for college.....and probably longer than that.....so we are talking a minimum of 32 years.....omg....this could explain my constant congestion and sinusitis.......maybe i am just allergic to my favorite pillows......breaking away will be tough.....my floppy pillow is so necessary for sleep that i take it with me when i travel......it has been transatlantic more than most people i know.......but i am willing to seek out replacements if it means that i can breathe easily again.............

miscarriage.....

ok, so my book club came to a vote at a high point in the conversation....how many women present had suffered a miscarriage?........and 5/6 women present had done just that.........women that not on my radar for such loss............so much more in common that i thought previously..............stories to share aside from book club, obviously.................the woman present who had never miscarried was actually the oldest to conceive and the oldest to deliver.....her first and only pregnancy.........who knew?.................but back to loss.......there was discussion of what the other children had said after loss.......i recall both of our sons asking me about the baby that didn't come home from the hospital.....,much simpler than sara who miscarried at 20 weeks......i had no idea..........abortion is one thing, but the trauma of miscarriage is more to the point of a woman's existence..........

entertaining interlude.......

ok, so i left my pda's rhapsody music program playing when i took the stairs to warm up my pasta and chicken/sundriedtomato sausage leftover lunch to the second-story kitchennette microwave.....and as i came back into my corridor the refrain from a mountain goats tune was playing....'i'm going to kill everybody in this room'.......luckily...nobody else was in the building.................few of my work acquaintence would understand..............

positive body image......

ok, so.....the winter olympics are good for my soul......because i see msyelf in the women competing more often than not........on the women's speed skating events...in downhill and slalom.....in bobsled........in cross country......rugged, endurance-oriented females are built for strength.......with appropriately designed hips, thighs....etc.....frail women are selectively eliminated.....by death or disqualification.......

book club......

ok, so book club went very well....mostly because the foods we served are part of our usual fare.......hummus, stuffed grape leaves, couscous, sauteed spinach with onions and garlic, cucumbers in sour cream with scallions, marinated baked fish fillets.........the book seemed to take a back seat to the meal....not our intentions.....lamb is a brilliantly irreverant take on jesus aka joshua's life between the scene at the temple when he was 12 and his baptism at age 30 or so........we did discuss the middle east's conflict with regards to islam and the portrayal of the holy one.....and decided that the portrayal of jesus as blond and blue eyed is just as profane........a small group of us will travel to lex saturday to see brokeback mountain........in summary......a grand evening with good friends............

more mea culpa.....

ok, so i completely forgot to wish a fellow february birthday person happy birthday a while back.........for the record she is the oldest 19 year-old i know........one of these days i will cry uncle and offer to pay you to help me figure out my playlist problems..............but i still hope to navigate the maze that is music management on my own............hope you had a great day.........

angst abated.......

ok, so......the meanest mamma around has been in a decided funk since christmas....when an untranslated letter turned up in amongst papers that were being sorted.....a letter from my cousin in lambsheim...the one we visited on our grand roots tour.......and when my eldest read it out to me with his college acquired skills...i was horrified....that he was saddened that we(read this as I) had not kept up correspondence and if he did not hear from us he would assume that something was terribly wrong.....and well...you know the rest...the letter was dated more than a year ago.....more than 2 years ago......and it must have come when my life was in flux....and when i had nobody to translate......and it was set aside and then forgotten.....i have been in a state of semi-despair since andrew read the letter aloud.....and that moment comes back to me at times when i am otherwise self-flagelating.......and then i walked out to the road to get the mail this evening....to find not just a letter from lambsheim...but a 50th birthday card.....omg......andrew must certainly have written to let them know that i am feeble and forgetful......the contents of the envelope...both card and letter are auf deutsch.......so i will have to wait for my eldest to translate again.........regardless.....i am overjoyed that we have repaired the breech......and that my old-world relations do not think ill of me.......life is good.....well, except for the turning fifty part......but turning 50 is better than the alternative.......

still in a state of regret......

ok, so i am more than 48 hours since i mistakenly deleted downloaded music from the desktop that i thought was correctly transferred to my documents file.....each song seems to be in said documents file but none will agree to be imported into any of the available music management programs.....and thus i can play them only one at a time rather than in a playlist......and i feel like i should be able to figure this out....think scarlett o'hara int he classic scene where she thrusts the dirt up to the sky and declares that she will never be hungry again.....i will make this music play......just not on this day............because i am old and need my rest.....maybe tomorrow......

answering machine.....

ok, so the message on the answering machine...on this president's day when i worked and most of the nation did not......cayle, this is courtney.......you hadn't called me today, but if you do call i cannot talk to you on the phone because i have lost my phone priviledges....so don't call....see you tomorrow........being 13 doesn't get any more confusing than that................