Recipes, Reading, & Beauty Tips

I've been digging for more information about my dad's family, who lived in Oakland.  A family full of secrets, some of which my sister and I have figured out, others only to be guessed at.

Yesterday I nearly went blind reading newspaper archives online, but--Eureka!--I came across a tiny article on page 10 of the September 11, 1949, Oakland Tribune that described the bus accident in Piedmont that mortally injured my grandmother.  She had no ID in her purse, but she did have a business card from my dad's antiques shop in San Francisco.  The police called him, and he identified her.  I'd known only bits of the story before that.

 

Disturbing and very sad, but it feels good to have the facts



2.

Pork roasts:  How many have I overcooked?  The last time was Christmas 1996--you can see how long I've been defeated by it--the last Christmas my dad was alive (still feel bad about it-- overcooked pork and undercooked green beans).  True to form, my sister and I, nervous about undercooking it, roasted it to the point where it was dry and tough.  Awful.

Last week I came across a recipe online that made me think I should make another stab at it.  This time it was a pork tenderloin, and it was good. Very tasty and not dry.  The seasoned rub takes it to another level.   And it's easy:

Pork Tenderloin with Seasoned Rub
4 servings; preheat oven to 450 degrees

1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp dried thyme
Salt
1-1/4 pounds pork tenderloin
1 T olive oil
1 tsp minced garlic

Mix the dry ingredients, stir.  Sprinkle over tenderloin, then rub them on the meat, pressing the rub so it sticks.

In large skillet over medium heat, add olive oil, then minced garlic; sauté 1 min.  Put tenderloin in pan and sear (less than 10 minutes), turning the meat with tongs.  Transfer meat to roasting pan and bake for 20 minutes.

 

3.

I'm really enjoying Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter.  Boy, he took some chances writing this book, and it works, I think.  Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan, whose voice drives me so crazy I always turn her off, agrees (blurb on the front).

The picture of the cover looked vaguely familiar to me, and when I studied it, I realized that Jerry and I went to this Cinque Terre village, Manorola,  in Italy in 2011.  In fact, we ate lunch at a restaurant there that I could just make out in the photo.

Here's a picture I took of him while we sat there:

Pretty cute
 

4.

 

You can skip this section if you're not shallow.   In my seeing-65-hove-into-view mood (a year and a half, but who's counting?), I've been checking out more beauty tips. 

 

First:  If you wear bangs, and esp. if you wear bangs and have a cowlick (I do), try this tip I found on You Tube:  Dry your bangs first, when they're very wet.  Snap on the blow dryer attachment that funnels the hot air and using a flat brush,  blow the bangs first to one side,then to the other,  across your forehead, brushing them madly as you go until they're thoroughly dry.

Bottom brush, wrong; top brush, right (not pictured: the flat brush)

Second:  And this is so basic that everyone else is doing it, I know: Use a fully-round brush to blow dry your hair if you want fullness.  I was using a half-round brush and blowing mostly the ends, and guess what, it was flat. This has made a huge difference in the flat-hair department. 

Also, I'm doing what my hairdresser does: sectioning off  my hair so that I'm drying the lower sections first.  I bought some cheap, cute clips to do this. Whole procedure takes time, which is why I'm in my jammies at 1 pm.

Another strategy:  I don't use the highest heat on the blow dryer anymore.  Too drying.

Third:  The Estee Lauder "Advanced Night Repair," which I got a sample of recently seems to do some good.  Skin feels plumper.  Still have the dreaded "11" between my eyes, though.

 

Always way behind the curve on fashion, I finally bought some mauve nail polish.  (Jerry took one look at my hands and said  I look like I'm not getting enough oxygen.  It's the color of ceanothus, I pointed out, one of his favorite moth host-plants.)

But then I found an article in the fall fashion edition of the New York  Times magazine that announced that glamorous, pointy red nails are back.  No more "politely blunt manicures."  These are mid-century and "dangerously modern." 

The current look for nails

Also, lips that are stained are in.  You want to look like you've just bitten your lips in pain. 

Not going with this

 

5.

Rooting around on the computer, I discovered that my grandparents' house in East Oakland, in what used to be a working class neighborhood but now is such a scary place that no one goes there unless they have to, has had a large addition tacked on the back, taking up much of my grandmother's prized garden.

Here she is sitting in the garden in 1942:

Daisy in her garden in East Oakland in 1942

 

An English garden with stepping stones and a bench

 

Here's how the garden looked in 1995, when the house was sold after years of being rented, both of my grandparents long gone.

 



 

Not much left of Daisy's garden. (Note color of flowers.)



 




.







Sunday in the Park

Yesterday we drove over to Pt. Reyes National Seashore and walked the Bear Valley trail all the way out to the coast (4 miles), a hike we hardly ever do.  Felt very accomplished when we got back to the car.

Why does it always take so long to get underway?  Sunscreen, food, hat...

 

 

 

 

Sunny at the beginning.  I love the smell of bay trees.

 

 

Some water in the creek, not a lot

Fog at the Divide Meadow.

 

 

 

But we ate lunch there, anyway. My glasses got misted with fog drip.

 

 

Onward to Arch Rock

Heading out toward the beach

 

Somebody pushed a stroller all the way out there.  We could see the small rider down on the beach.

 

Had to mark the occasion with a selfie

 

 

On that beach in 1977

 

 

The return trip was more of a trudge.  A relief to see the car in the distance.

 

 

Woe is Pat

Last night, honest to God, I couldn't get to sleep for worrying about Pat Nixon. 

You know that perception we all had when she was First Lady that she was terribly pent-up, always doing the right thing but in a mechanical way?   (During Watergate, I remember my friend Rob postulating that she must have had one friend who visited once a year so the two of them could go into closet and close the door so Pat could unload.  He was just about right--her name was Helene Drown.)

Turns out we were all correct.     Reading about her in "Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages that Shaped our History," by journalist Kati Marton, had me feeling sad and riled.   I don't like reading about empty marriages that eat up decades of lives.

Marton says that after Nixon's 1960 defeat, Pat had had it with politics.  Nixon lived for politics, and she wanted to stay married, so she endured both her marriage and the role she'd been thrust into.

  According to Marton,  the Nixons did nothing together, except when protocol required it. They barely spoke.  If Nixon wanted to tell her something, he'd direct aides to send a memo to her office.

 Their daughter, Julie, who wrote a biography of Pat, described her parents' relationship as "very private; they were "undemonstrative."  Marton terms their marriage after 1958 "a charade," which seems closer to the mark.

"She and her husband continued to value above all else harmony in their marriage--at almost any price," writes Marton.  And what a price.   Marton quotes Pat as saying of a trip to Hawaii  in 1952, that it was "the last carefree vacation I ever had."

The Nixons in 1952, the year of the "last carefree vacation."

Pat Nixon died in 1993.  That's forty-one years of doing the right thing even though it lacks personal meaning or the embrace of love underpinning it.

Sometimes I'm puzzled by somebody else's marriage.  I see that it's one I might not want for myself, but then I think a) you can never know what goes on in some one else's marriage, and b) they probably talk a lot when they're alone together.

Neither a) or b) worked last night when I was trying to get to sleep.

The truth is so haunting that I lose track of the fact that they were Republicans and just feel sorry for them.

Frass, etc.

Last week I picked a few flowers from the garden to put on the kitchen windowsill, kind of a cheery-homey thing.

Soon tiny black balls littered the windowsill.  I knew what this was:  bug poop, otherwise known as frass.  I learned this years ago from Jerry-the-entomologist. 

Note the tiny black balls

I wiped away the disgusting black balls, searched the flowers for the defecating worms, found none, and left the flowers on the windowsill.

Next day, more frass.

I complained.  Jerry examined the flowers and found a worm.  Then he explained that the reason the black balls were some distance from the vase is because the worm possesses something called an "anal comb," which enables the worm to fling frass.

Then he coaxed the worm into a vial because he's going to raise it and identify it.  He's pretty sure it's a tortricid, a group of moths he specializes in.  The frass-shooting behavior is diagnostic.

                                                                                2.



A few years ago, I took a drawing class at the local adult school.  It was a revelation.  Drawing turns out to be something you can learn.  I always thought it was something art majors were born with.

Very hard

We drew eggs, oranges, ladders (tricky).  I found it was very meditative.  It's almost as good as swimming for taking me out of my dreary, worry-obsessed self.  True, it's time-consuming, but it's also engaging, and if you can give yourself over to it, it's very relaxing.

Drawing makes me look at the world more carefully.
 

This took ages and let's face it, it's crooked.  Don't care...

                                                                               3.

Yesterday, I got into the car with my friend Anne to drive to the pool, and she told me that her nephew, in his fifties and recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, is not doing well.  He's had surgery and radiation, but the tumor is growing again.  Anne's preparing to drop everything and fly to Chicago, if necessary.

Damn it!  And an acquaintance from high school--Pat Monahan to Del Martians--just found out that the chemo she's been on for advanced breast cancer hasn't worked.  She's switching to another one, per her doctor's recommendation.  She quotes a fellow cancer patient's doctor:

"You can wake up each morning and worry about dying, or you can wake up each morning and celebrate living.  Before you know it, several years may have passed.  Do you want to waste that time with mourning, or use your time to celebrate?"

Brave, brave, brave.  She's celebrating--zip-lining, cruising, working on her bucket list--but I can't help thinking that I'd take more of a Woody Allen-depressive approach if I were in her shoes.


                                                                          3.

Also yesterday:  the pair of sisters who bail us out every two weeks by cleaning the house--God knows how much clutter would accumulate if they didn't come--appeared promptly at 1 pm.  They're always cheerful and kind.

The older one, Sonia, told me that she's 56, much older than she looks, and that she recently took a 10-1/2 hour Greyhound bus ride to Tijuana for medical treatment that she can't afford in the U.S. because she has no health insurance. She's looking forward to buying insurance under Obamacare. 

She rarely goes to the doctor, even though she has high blood pressure.

                                                                           4.

We have new neighbors, a family of five who moved here from San Francisco.  They're renting the house next door.  The boy, an eighth-grader,  is a fan of insects and spiders, and Jerry's already supplied him with a vial to collect things for identification.  The kid is very polite.

There's a spider in there from one of our new neighbors

One of his sisters plays soccer and practices in their backyard.  The other day while I was unloading groceries, a missile of some sort shot past me.  A soccer ball.  I tossed it back to the girl, who was peering over the fence and apologizing profusely.

                                                                         5.

Jerry and I watched a documentary we loved: "Undefeated" (2012 and an Oscar-winner).    It's about a poor high school in Memphis with a losing football team that's  taken under the wing of a volunteer coach, who inspires, preaches, and whips them into shape.  Even if you don't like football, it's moving and instructive.

Most of the players don't have their father in their lives and virtually all have a relative who's in or has been in prison.  College is a far-away dream, accessible only if they manage to win an athletic scholarship.

                                                                           6.

A friend wants me to talk to her  daughter today about insomnia and what I've learned about it. No reading in bed, same bedtime every night, no TV or computer within an hour of bed, limited caffeine.  It works.

Also, drawing, pool time, and walks in the Berkeley summer fog.  It's been one of those summers.

                                                                        

Cruising

I've been thinking about cruises, because we just took one and because of the reaction I get from people when I tell them that I liked it.

"God!"  I can see them thinking. "It's so bourgeoisie, it's expensive, you're on the ship's schedule, AND it sounds boring."

A friend's husband told her she can take him on a cruise--when he's ashes in an urn.  Jerry's daughter and her husband concluded, after hearing our tale from our first cruise, that they'd skip a cruise to Alaska they had in mind, and take a land trip, instead.

I get it.  I've taken a lot of land trips, planned them right down to where we'd have lunch, how often trains run to Churchill's country house, and whether we have enough time to make a plane connection at Frankfurt Airport.

By the time we went on the Alaska cruise a month ago, we were tired.  We'd just returned from a trip that required six flights in four weeks.  We'd stayed in five hotels and taken 85 train rides, counting all the tiny trains we took up and down mountains in Switzerland.   I had a three-page, typed itinerary I carried around in my purse.

The long road home

The cruise entailed two short flights, no train rides, and one hotel, aside from our stateroom.  We never came home exhausted from exploring, only to be faced with the dilemma of dinner--where to go?  Take-out?  A restaurant?  If so, where and which one?  We only had to decide whether we wanted room service or to go to one of the dining rooms.

The cruise was a rest.  If we wanted anything, we rang for the steward.  We never made the bed, and we never tidied our room.   And we got to see new things--not in the depth we would have if we'd done a land trip, but there were memorable experiences.  Floating around Tracy Arm Fjord was one; so were hikes in rainforest.  We saw baby eagles.

Tea and coffee delivered in the morning

Once we disembarked in Vancouver, all hell broke loose.  The port was mobbed, we couldn't find our bus, our flight was delayed by weather, Jerry's bag took forever to appear in San Francisco.  Then we waited in the wrong spot for a shuttle bus to long-term parking.  We got home at 2 in the morning.

Definitely needed more time

None of that happens when you're on a ship.  True, you're on the ship's schedule.   You go to ports where you would've liked more time (Florence, on our first cruise) and some where you had more than enough time (Monaco).  Sea days can be boring, or they can be deeply relaxing, or both.

You sample, you rest, you're cossetted. 

It felt like home at the end of each day--except tidy and with food delivered

At a Flower Stall in Victoria Station

Two e-mails from the UK this morning.   One was from Leah, my young friend next door who just graduated from college.  The other was from my cousin, Sue, who lives outside London.

Leah was in London last week on the first leg of a six-week trip.  Sue had fabric from our aunt that she wanted to give me to incorporate into a quilt.  I was hoping they'd be able to get together for a hand-off.

 

Sue

 

 

 

Leah

 

 

They did!  They met up at the flower stall at Victoria Station, had tea/breakfast, and looked at Leah's pictures.  My two worlds met:  two of my favorite people got together thousands of miles away.  Felt bucked-up all morning.

Today I sent Sue two jpegs I thought she'd enjoy:



With Annika and Leah at a wedding, 1999

 

  

Leah's 8th birthday the same year



                                                                              2.


Yesterday Jerry had his annual check-up with the cardiologist.  All is well!  He'd had some tests, and everything looked good except his bad cholesterol, which went up 20 points.  I'm back to being a Food Nazi, and he has to take more Lipitor.

After that I had four pieces of See's candy.  Two were samples that I didn't even like.  Made no sense.

                                                                               3.



Updates on recent posts:

 

 1.  There were 30 bids on the ruin of a house Jerry and I went to see in June.  Thirty people who want to deal with this: 

 

 

Asking price:  $599,000

 

 

 

2. My friend Ellen, who moved to Connecticut because she needed to be near family when she was diagnosed with early dementia, likes where she finds herself:  a assisted living facility near her brother's house.  The food is good, she likes her apartment, the staff is kind. 

 

 

Ellen, center, moved from Oakland to Connecticut in April

 

The description of the dining room, though, made me think of traveling alone on a cruise and not knowing where to sit.  A bit clique-ish, but she likes her tablemates now.

 

I think this is the best Ellen could have hoped for.  She longs for a cat and may get one from the pound. 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

Shopping Trip

One day last week I went shopping in Walnut Creek with two pool pals, Val and Anne.

Val wanted to go to Nordstrom and get fitted for new bras.

Anne needed a MOG (Mother of Groom) outfit because her son's getting married in September.  The search was modified to mean any sort of pulled together outfit that she felt comfortable in and could wear other times.  Her son's getting married under a big oak tree in his aunt's backyard in Berkeley.  Very casual.

                                                                          2.

Val disappeared in search of Intimate Apparel, third floor.  I'd warned her that this was going to cost her some real money based on my experience last year,  but she seemed unfazed.

                                                                           3.

Anne and I went to Talbots, a wise move because it turned out they were having a giant sale.  All the summer stuff--tops, pants, skirts, jackets--was 60% off.    The relatively conservative styles suit Anne, and she found a pair of pants, two tops, and a cardigan for $100, a coup.

At Nordstrom, we found nothing--edgier, heavier clothes at regular prices, all summer stuff gone.  If you're into aubergine, leather pants, and high heels, this is your year.

                                                                           4.

I returned a pair of shoes I'd bought on impulse a couple of weeks ago without trying them on (they were mailed to me).  I thought they would add a touch of glamour and be comfy.  When they arrived, I wore them around the house and decided they didn't fit.  Fit trumps glamour.

The salesperson who accepted the return examined the shoes very carefully, but I'd taken the precaution of running a lint remover over the soles so there was no evidence of my bad housekeeping (thread, dental floss, bits of this and that, not good).

                                    5.
                                                                     
Val met up with us, carrying a bag full of pretty bras.  The most expensive cost $88.  She still seemed unfazed.  When she heard about the sale at Talbots, she rushed off to check it out.  Anne and I persevered with her search for shoes.  Nothing worked out, but it was a good place to sit down.



                                                                            6.

"Chili" is top row, fourth from left

I  dashed off to buy a lipstick: Mac's "Chili."  It's bright red, so I always wear it with a more neutral, glossy color over it.  God knows if it makes any difference.  I'm approaching an age that ends in a "5," and this has me in a flap.

Also managed to wheedle a sample of Estee Lauder "Advanced Night Repair."  Has anyone used this?  I'm curious to see if it works, given all the hype,  but I didn't want to pay the exorbitant price. 

                                                                             7.

Reconnoitered in Women's Shoes.  Val had bought two tops at Talbots.  This was turning into a very successful expedition.  We repaired for iced coffee. 

                                                                              8.

We weren't far from Crate and Barrel, so I bought Jerry a cup and saucer. He doesn't like mugs, and the cups and saucers he's using don't work well.  The cup's too tall, and he's always knocking it over when he's sitting at his desk, getting coffee all over his papers.  Lots of swearing. 

He likes the new one, which is shorter and heavier.  The saucer has an off-center resting spot for the cup, which leaves room for a morning cookie.

Crate and Barrel's "Madison."  Made in Germany.

                                                                      

Meet Daisy

This is what I've been up to lately:

My paternal grandmother, Daisy,  as a young girl in England. 

 

 

 

 

Doesn't she look like a "Downton Abbey" servant on her day off?  She was a domestic servant in England, but this photo was taken after she'd emigrated to the United States in 1912. 

 

 

 

 

Stern stuff:  Daisy in the 1930's or '40's.  Daughter of  a fishmonger, wife of a streetcar conductor. She died seven months before I was born.

 

I've got marriage and death certificates, family albums, and print-outs from findmypast.co.uk scattered all over the floor near my computer.  So far, I've discovered that my grandfather had an earlier marriage before the one to Daisy, wife unknown.  And that Daisy knocked four years off her age on her marriage certificate.