What a Shock!

 I haven't blogged in almost ten years since my husband Greg died.  I tried to get on Blogger now and then but was unsuccessful.  Well, today I clicked on a few things and I find myself here on Blogger again.

So much has changed in my life since ten years ago.  I have moved and sold the house I shared with Greg and am not happily ensconced in a condo.  My dear best friend Olive, the pug, died about two years ago of respiratory failure.  I miss her every single day.  But I have adopted two cats to keep me company and I love them to the moon and back.

My daughter Carrie is here with me and working on completing her degree at Worcester State University.  My son Evan is the Assistant Director of the Webster Public Library and is in a relationship with a lovely librarian Leah, who is also employed as a public librarian.  

I am happy, pretty healthy for my age, and traveling whenever someone asks me if I want to go.  

Here are a few pics from my present life.  

My beautiful Captain Cat Janeway.  She's the boss and Dax's mother.

The sill Lieutenant Jadzia Dax, Janeway's daughter.

That's me on a recent trip to Portugal and Spain.

And in Victoria, British Columbia celebrating High Tea.

Respite in Palm Springs...

I didn’t want to give up traveling when Greg died, however I am not so comfortable traveling alone to places I’ve never been before. But I am very lucky to have good friends and my friends Dona and Bob invited me to tag along with them and another friend Connie to check out Palm Springs in February of 2016. 

We stayed in a terrific, comfortable mid-century modern house with a pool and hot tub because Palm Springs is known for its mid-century modern architecture.  Driving around looking at houses is one of the prime things to do for tourists there. 

I took tons of pics as we went and here are a few of them.

This is the Kaufmann House designed by Richard Neutra.  These are the same Kaufmanns who owned Falling Water designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  I love their taste in architecture.  This house is ideal for the Palm Springs climate because there is little differentiation between indoors and out.  The room you see in this picture is the outdoor living room.

The photo doesn't do it justice, but this is the absolutely fabulous Dinah Shore house in Palm Springs.  This house was designed by architect Donald Wexler. The famous resident these days is Leonardo DiCaprio. Rumor has it that one can occasionally find him standing at the end of his driveway in his bathrobe smoking cigarettes. I guess he doesn't want to sully the inside of the house. 

One of seven Steel Houses designed by architect Donald Wexler.

Here’s the door to Frank Sinatra’s former home, which is now an events venue.  Yes, you can rent it.  

Elvis and Priscilla Presley spent their honeymoon in this house, The Alexander Estate, in May of 1967.  You can tour this house and apparently they have guides who are dressed up like Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Our guide told us that it is getting more and more difficult to find people to do that job, because young people are no longer into Elvis. 
If you Google The Alexander Estate, Palm Springs you can see shots of the interior of this house.

Miscellaneous cool house.

And another.

This is my favorite kind of architecture so I was in hog heaven down in Palm Springs.  Greg and I talked about going to visit off and on, but never got the chance.  Thanks to my friends, I was able to cross that one off my bucket list.  But of course, houses aren't the only cool thing about Palm Springs, so I will probably revisit it virtually again some time.

Sparks...

I am notorious for having a bad memory.  This is nothing new for me, I have struggled to remember things all my life – people’s names, birthdates, what year something happened – you know the drill.  But now and then something crops up that sparks a specific memory.  That happened to me when Carrie and I were in Salem last week. 

We got there in the late afternoon on Sunday when most things were closed.  No worries.   The purpose of our trip was relaxation so we got settled into our room and just took it easy for a while.  Then we took a little walk and did some window shopping.  We had dinner and relaxed some more in our room at The Merchant.

On our walk around Salem.

I love this dress.  If I were forty years younger and much much thinner, I might have taken it home.

The next morning, we had a very nice breakfast at the hotel before wandering around and doing some actual shopping.  I bought a book.  Surprise!  Then after a very good lunch at Howling Wolf Mexican restaurant, we headed to the beach.

One of the nice little touches for breakfast at The Merchant.

It was a beautiful bright blue day, but it was cold and windy.  Still, we wandered around Salem Willows Park and watched the gulls circling overhead.  That was when the spark hit me.  

At Salem Willows Park, Salem, Massachusetts.

When I was a kid in early grade school, I had a good friend named Kim.  Kim father’s name was Shirley.  That, of course, is apropos of nothing, but it is interesting to me that I remember it.  You don’t meet men named Shirley every day.  At some point during those grade school years, Shirley uprooted Kim and her family and they moved to Ashland, Kentucky.  We kept our friendship going by writing letters to one another, as people did back in the day, and one day I got an invitation to go down to Kentucky to visit Kim.  

I must have been nine or ten at the time.  In any case, I was young.  My parents put me on the train in Middletown, Ohio and I rode it down to Ashland.  I don’t remember much about the train ride itself except that the attendant kindly checked on me now and then to make sure I was okay.  I got there fine.

I also don’t remember much about the visit except that one day, Kim and I were out riding bikes on her street.  I do remember being impressed that her neighborhood had sidewalks something that we never had, because at the time our house was out in the country.  Anyhow, it was summertime and on our bike ride we got hot and stopped to cool down under the shade of a tree.  Kim looked up and as she did, a bird shit on her head. 

Yes, you heard me right.  A bird hit her square on the forehead.  I regretted it immediately and I’ve regretted it ever since, but I laughed.   I have a feeling that that laugh was the beginning of the end of our friendship, because we eventually lost touch and I have no idea what happened to Kim Keller, though I always suspected that she became a nun because that was the phase we were into when we were kids together.  She probably thinks I’m a nun too if she ever thinks of me.  But I’m sure we’re both wrong.  At least I know she’s wrong about me.

If you ever see this blog post, Kim, I’m very sorry I laughed...and I hope you aren't a nun.  Not that there's anything wrong with it.

One Way to Miscommunicate in the Modern World

It has been kind of a tough winter in some ways and my daughter Carrie, who lives out in Northampton, Massachusetts, has been working very hard on school things and other things she is involved in at Greenfield Community College.  So I thought that we could both use a little breather and offered to take her to The Porches Inn in North Adams, Massachusetts, during her spring break.

So I texted her.  “When’s your spring break?” I asked. “You want to do an overnight at Porches?”

The Porches Inn is a great B&B in North Adams, Massachusetts, where we’ve stayed in the past.  AND it’s right across from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a very cool place.

She texted me back, “18-24 (so like, week after next), I only have plans for 23^rd and 24^th.  That’d be great.”

I told her I’d check it out and check with Evan to see if he could stay with Olive, the pug.

So after a little back and forth, I got on the Mass MoCA website and determined they wouldn’t be open the day we would be there and that, anyway, The Porches Inn had no rooms available when we wanted to be there either sooooo…I asked her if she would like to do something else.  She said yes.

I put a figurative pin in the map and looked for someplace an hour and a half or so from here and decided that Salem would be fun and I found what looked like a very cool boutique hotel there called The Merchant and asked if I should book the night of the 18^th.

The Merchant, Salem Massachusetts

“Sure!  Sounds great,” she said with a smiley face.

So I got on line and booked us a nice king room with a sleeper sofa for the night of April 18.  We were all set.  Then I put it on my Google calendar and invited Carrie to okay it.   She declined.

I texted, “I got a message that you declined the trip to Salem on the 18^th of April.  I imagine it was just one of those Google glitches, because I don’t figure it means you don’t want to go.  Right?”

She texted back, “I just like having it set up in my way rather than via the invite.”

“Good,” I texted.

So last Saturday, the 17^th of March, I was at our church, The Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church, working at our annual silent auction fundraiser.  At some point, I checked my phone and saw that I had a message from Carrie saying she didn’t know when she would be out because she was busy, so it might be in the morning.  Confused, I let her know that, of course, she could come out whenever she wanted to.

After a long night, I came home to find Carrie working on some calculus problem and because I was exhausted from the night’s work, I crashed on the couch.  Then I got curious.  Had Carrie come to visit for a reason that I had forgotten?  I remembered we had talked vaguely about going to see the movie Vertigo at the theater, but I didn’t think it was that.  So, thinking that it’s best to know when you’re unsure, I asked her why she was here.

“We’re going to Salem tomorrow,” she said a bit casually.  She didn't let on what she was thinking.

“What?  I thought we were going in April,” I countered.

“But this is my spring break,” she said.

Well, knock me over with a feather!  I screwed up.  In my mind, I thought she meant April and in her mind, she thought I had just been having a senior moment when I said April in my text.

Okay.  Long story short, I was able to change the reservation, Evan said he could watch the dog and off we went to Salem to The Merchant for a nice relaxing overnight on Sunday, March 18^th. 

Willingness to be flexible is a good thing when it comes to screwing up communications.  Had I noticed that Carrie had said “like week after next” this could have been avoided.  And if she had thought to question me on my April calendar entry, I could have made the changes sooner.  

Oh, well…  No worries.  It all worked out and we had a good time.

We were in Suite No. 1.  A room with real keys.

The view from our window

Instead of chocolates on the pillow, you get peppercorns at The Merchant together with a recipe for a Peppercorn Daquiri.

Ahhhh.....

Unfinished Business

I am constantly amazed at how fast time goes by.  It has been over two years since my husband Greg died and so that long since I have posted anything on my blog page.  Part of the reason for that is that right after he died, I didn’t have a lot of desire to pick up my camera.  I was simply overwhelmed.  And then I got so busy that I didn’t have time to pick up my camera.

There is so much to be done after someone dies and it has to be done when you least feel like doing it.  Closing accounts and dealing with financial matters, cancelling subscriptions to magazines, sorting through a closet of coats to donate to homeless shelters for the winter – mundane things and, of course, drastic things.  

Olive, the pug, and I spent the winter after Greg died in our big, old house and I made a pledge to myself that it would be our last winter there.  So when I could bear to do it, I began sorting through and throwing away.  It is both difficult and painful to go through 35 years of accumulated stuff.  I asked myself time and again how the heck we let things get so out of hand.  But it got done with much help from my friends and my wonderful kids.

In a matter of months, I sold Greg’s two motorcycles, traded in both of our cars for a Rav4 Hybrid and had an estate sale, with the help from a bit of a wacky, but tireless, estate sale professional.  At this sale everything that wasn’t able to walk out of the old place was on the market. Of course, I kept all the memories.

And in July, the house got snatched up before I had a minute to think about it and I lucked into an end unit condo in the place where I wanted to be.  And though I went through many sleepless nights worrying that things would get screwed up in some way, all things fell into place as if things were meant to actually happen the way they did.  Again it was with a lot of help from my kids and my friends.

So here I am with Olive and we are very happy.  We have a lot less stuff, even though my daughter Carrie insists that I didn’t get rid of nearly enough of my books.  Well, some things you just have to be able to keep. 

My new place - bright, sunny and cheerful.

Life is always interesting even when it is sometimes unbearable.  I hope to make the most of it while I still can.  So I am going to try to get back into the habit of picking up my camera and blogging when I have something to say. 

P.S.  I don't know if it was because I was away from Blogger for so long or what, but it seems I can't continue on with my old Blog (Commonplace Beauty Photography) so here is a link to the old blog in case you're interested.
http://commonplacebeautyphotography.blogspot.com/