Tag Archives: life

Women

Posted on April 1, 2015 | 2 comments

For centuries doctors did not even think of studying women or their diseases. They only concentrated on men and convinced women that they were suffering from hysteria. When women swooned, it was probably that their corset was tied too tight, see Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and another character I loved in Hattie McDaniel, her maid that made that corset tight.

Now we have walks and runs for breast cancer. That’s a good thing, because the medical people finally chose to get along with knowing how women also have heart attacks differently than men.

For years studies have shown that television, movies and video games have led to violence in men. As far as I know, no-one has studied whether movies, television and video games lead to subservience in women.

I did my high school thesis on Title IX, entitled “Horses Sweat, Men Perspire and Women Glow.”  What we see in life is not what we see on screen. I have my prince, but not Clark Gable or Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando or Gregory Peck and let’s throw in Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan into the mix. I’m talking about their movies and what the public thinks about their persons.

That’s what girls look for. I got all of those with a physicist/software engineer. Don’t get me wrong, I never looked and it took 20 years after age 20 to find my prince. He found me. He says I found him. I say we found each other on that day 14 years ago. In him I also found my crushes Alan Bates and Alan Rickman. So, call it a day.

What do girls look for now? I was very upset that young teen girls, over Thanksgiving, were looking at a Barbie website. Media only employs skinny girls, mainly blond, and stupid. Girls don’t have a chance to meet ideal model weight so become bulimic or anorexic trying to gain favor with parents and others.

So what happens to smart girls like me who grew up in the dark ages? I love Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Kathy Bates, Meryl Streep, Penny Marshall, Diane Keaton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Olivia d’Havilland, Kathleen Turner, Jodie Foster, Greta Scacchi, Glenn Close, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn (who was much stronger than she looked), and many young actresses I’ve seen on screens as they matured and walk and talk like smart women.

Thank you role models. And My Girl Friday. Also Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. There are so many of you for girls to see yet you’re off playing Barbie. Think smart and strong, young ladies. And a good mornin’ to ye! Dee

 

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Regeneration

Posted on March 20, 2015 | 1 comment

My old MacBook smells. Over Thanksgiving I realized it only had about two minutes of power off electrical juice, making it OK at my desk but not on the road. My husband got a new battery for me that we charged overnight. I’ve got it on a silicone mat on a glass desk. That battery is hot. I’m emptying it now off power.

Now there are three days of tech instructions I need to go through to baby a $20 battery. I’m going out on the street with a sign that says “Will Work For Batteries.” Let’s guess how many homeless people will sign up. I also use a hand-me-down iPhone 3 that only lasts 20 minutes off the juice so now keep it hooked up in the car on any trip longer than 15 minutes because if we need to move two cars cross-country we’ll need to keep in touch. Methinks it may be time to regenerate by switching to new products I love, that work.

As the sun is red and peeking through clouds this morning I think that our entire world regenerates every day with sun and moon. I’ve a small flowering plant in a 4″ pot that I moved and forgot to water for a day. The leaves and flowers wilted. Yesterday I gave it about a tablespoon of water and overnight it came back to life.

That’s what we do. Get sucker-punched, use your brain to beat it. Learn never to go through that again. The “fool me once” principle. We are regenerists. We survive. Darwin is still here, he’s just at my desk and very warm. I need to take out the dog. Cheers and have a great day! Dee

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Heat and Light

Posted on January 13, 2015 | 5 comments

Both are things we treasure in cold weather, especially as I witnessed a first ice fisher out there today, only a few feet from the jetty as the ice is thin.

We also treasure it in inspiration. I don’t remember cooking before age seven when I miraculously found a cookbook in a dusty village library while my mother was off to the grocery store.

The first recipe I ever cooked was from that book, Betty Crocker’s Boys and Girls Cookbook. It was curled carrots. I sliced carrots thinly, and placed them in ice water in the frig. Two hours later I took them out to serve. My grandfather was visiting at the time and he called them “suicide carrots.” Such was the beginning of my culinary life. Everything I cooked he thought he’d die from ingesting.

I wanted my grandfather, parents, siblings, friends and everyone to like me. I learned to cook. Perhaps the best thing my father liked was a cassoulet I made for him from Simca Beck’s recipe many years ago. I would love to make it for him again, with my brother, with two days in the kitchen and items from France I didn’t have. Or we could make it Italian. He may like it even better.

Aunts L and J were also wonderful mentors in cooking and proper English. They still love food and create food for those in need of a good meal, as volunteers.

I was devastated when my husband loved my ten minute (check blog) vegetarian lasagne more than my four-hour version with long-cooked Bolognese and boiled noodles. Then I realized if I made lasagne in ten minutes and cooked it for an hour we’d have more time together.

Lasagne = love? Food, sharing, togetherness, conversation, a toast, that is love. With my berry trifle, it’s also decadence.

As to food I’ve a final exam to pass. Our Swedish neighbor G taught me to make Kottbullar, Swedish meatballs, for us and my husband a few months ago and now I have to take the test and make it for him.

My challenge to Swedish G is true Texas chili, my riff on a classic 1962 recipe from Lady Bird Johnson that was served on the Pedernales ranch for 5,000 guests including JFK.

He’ll have to grind the meat, saute the onions and garlic, add spices and try it three hours later. Then he’ll have his test a couple of weeks later and make it for me. Food is love, darlin’. My husband loves G’s Kottbullar.

My view on life is that if anyone of any nationality or faith met another of a differing one and cooked and sat at a meal together there would not be wars.

Food is friendship, food is love, taste and sharing an experience. I am a complex person and use words to opine, not swards, guns or bombs. I think we spend a lot of our tax dollars for “diplomats” to dine with representatives of other nations. The food may be good but perhaps it is not enjoyed with the camaraderie that best represents our countries.

Savor. Let’s have presidents, princes, diplomats dig in a garden for their meal, together. Cook it, together, and serve, family style to their people. That may actually lead to a representative democracy here in the US of A. and may help other nations as well.

Early on my heat was an Easy Bake Oven. I used it three times. Cooking with a light bulb? Come on. From there I saw light. Thank you, everyone, for getting me here. Cheers! Dee

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Limitations

Posted on June 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

As a little girl, I’d say to my mother that Debbie had invited a few of us girls for a sleepover. She’d say “why would she want YOU there?”

First jobs during college, picking weeds and resurfacing clay tennis courts at a summer resort. I wasn’t allowed to sit on the roller as that was a manly job, just do all the scut work.

After college, I finally got a good and interesting job but my boss was elevated from my job so I got to do all the organizing and writing but when it came to negotiations and deliberations I was not allowed at the party. Trust.

I left him abruptly to go be a lobbyist in NYC. My boss took my words and said “Go downtown, I’ll have your testimony before you have to go on.” Yes, she did, changing three or four words and commandeering a car to get her there usually about a minute before I spoke, thus I never got to see the changes.

When employers do not train their employees to do what is needed to get the job done, that does a disservice to both. When employees are asked to do certain things to make things right and do them, an employer must reconsider their status if they’ve been downgraded.

I’ve been a boss and have also created and managed many volunteer projects over the years. I find that honey, not vinegar, is the key. Discussion, sometimes “you could do this better, here’s how to do it and thanks for volunteering.”

One client had a board after events that was called Goods and Betters. It wasn’t what went right and wrong, it was what was good and what we’d need to do better, as in name tags weren’t at the table and had to be gotten from the car.

Teamwork, common goal, benchmarks, praise, trust tend to work better than what I’ve encountered throughout parts of my life. As to a mother telling a kid that no-one would want to play with them, I’m still at a loss and I can’t talk to her about it because she’s gone.

When I was young I allowed some limitations to get the best of me. It took until I was 30 to come into my own as a person. Now I see these young pro athletes and they’re young enough to at least be my sons, if not nearly grandkids. They don’t see limitations, they see opportunities and so do I. Cheers! Dee

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Trajectories

Posted on April 15, 2013 | 1 comment

Before I begin, permit me to honor the life and work of comic genius Jonathan Winters. His brilliance will be missed in this world, but think what kind of party they’re having in the afterlife!

* * *

I just read about horrible job interviews and how they led to refusals or acceptances of what turned out to be great or bad jobs and thought about how these change our lives.

Thinking about our lives now, we are mobile but together, but our trajectories could have changed in any way since birth. Jim may have become a dairyman/rancher if only to keep his father’s business going. He was more methodical and focused but has been bounced around a bit in life by economic downturns.

I have had many decisions to make in life, and in some I’ve done well. In others I wasn’t confident enough to trust my brain and gut to get there but in my 30’s I learned a lot about myself and what is needed to get things done and thank my dear friends for that journey every day.

Jim and I met over lunch at a restaurant in So Cal. Random, or fate. What would have happened if either of us made any other school/job/life decision otherwise, if we’d each taken a different trajectory?

We’ve been together nearly 12 years, married for over ten. We have a nine year-old dog that we adopted as six weeks of age and is going strong. I believe one calls it traction.

* * *

Let’s go to cooking. Friday night is pizza night and I make the crust and everything. I do not like the texture or taste of regular supermarket mozzarella and have been able to find a drier version of fresh mozz that is tasty.

Unluckily, I got ovolini, fresh, and tried to dry it out on paper towels before adding to the pizza (which also had sauteed porcini and a few slices of deli pepperoni. The mushrooms lost all their liquid by the sautee so the cheese leaked all over the pizza, the crust was stuck and it was a nightmare to clean up after, but tasty. Live and learn. Next one will be Fontina val D’Aosta and perhaps roasted butternut squash, even though my dear husband will ask “where’s the meat?”

We’re very different but belong together as we make each other stronger. Plus he has saved every electrical cord he’s met since birth. Years ago there was a cable company that only took care of our condos. They’d leave for two hours at a time and come back smelling like cannabis.

They’d been at our place for a 10-minute installation and I wanted to get out of there and run some errands. When they said they had to go back to the truck to get some simple tv/cable wire I said “Wait!” I got Jim’s box off the top of the closet, picked a set of wires and asked “Is this it?” Reluctantly they said yes and fixed it immediately without another 2-hour cannabis session in the truck.

Yes, my stuff is in his way and his is in mine but that’s the way it goes in a friendship, relationship, marriage. See, I have saved things that he needs now.

That fateful day we met, we talked for over three hours, then exchanged numbers (I had no cell phone) and shook hands and walked away. The next day, he called and asked me to the movies and dinner and opened the car door and when he took my hand to open the door for me to exit, he held it and has never let go. When I look up the printed maps for our old neighborhood, I see directions to my place from 2001 and it’s heartwarming. Good and tired after taxes were accepted. Dee

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Like My Menus

Posted on April 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

I also fall into place. Most of the people I know and love are true Type A personalities. I look for the job and narrow it down and something tells me to take one. When I haven’t waited for it my job has stunk.

Whether it’s a feeling in my heart or my gut, I know when something is right. That’s how I met my husband, how we got our dog, how I got our new temporary apartment with 24 hours notice, and they even furnished it in that time.

I know when a job is right for my husband and he’s only contradicted me once and it was a disaster. I don’t tell people this, they’ll think I’m a bit “teched in the head” but something/someone tells me the right thing to do. I’m not talking right vs wrong because I’ve been taught that from birth, just what is right for us now when a decision must be made about, say, a place to live. When I find it, I’ve found it. That’s it. Years later my husband says, “I love this place.”

Perhaps all those thousands of volunteer hours piled up and I get a break, but that’s not it because my husband was laid off, then after we paid to move, his credit card was hacked and I was just hacked last week as well. As I said to my brother-in-law, we have quiet times interrupted by utter chaos. And we get through those times, both quiet and chaos.

For those in our new town on Lake Michigan, I’m here. The right volunteer or consulting opportunity will find me. The Feminist Homemaker is in the ‘hood. Dee

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