Melon Ice

The painting project in the minute downstairs bathroom is done:  two weeks and two days.  Bruce-the-painter just about moved in with us.  Of course, there was more to do than a bathroom: a hall, the entryway, and a bunch of doors that had to be hand-painted in oil-based enamel.

It turns out that for a large sum of money, you can have your 1980's  faux-sponged wallpaper  removed, and the mess of a wall it leaves behind completely rehabbed and painted with a very smooth and elegant color called "Melon Ice."  (Jerry calls it "Dilute Salmon.")  My sister and I spent part of Thanksgiving Day poring over Benjamin Moore color chips to come up with this color.  The first color, which I chose on my own, "Golden Apricot,"  felt wrong from the first swath on the wall.

Here are a couple of photos:  The After shot (no art, can't bear to hammer holes in it yet) and the Before.  It's hard to capture the cool sophistication of  the new color: think pink grapefruit sorbet.

After:  Melon Ice

In progress: Tribeca Loft ?

Look Up!

Yesterday we went to Pt. Pinole Regional Park to look for Monarch butterflies.  Each fall, Monarchs migrate from inland areas west of the Rockies to coastal areas with milder climates.  This is called "overwintering."  It's a mystery how they choose the same coastal areas year after year, but they do, and if you're lucky you can see masses of them at Natural Bridges State Park near Santa Cruz or in Pacific Grove near Monterey,  hanging from branches of eucalyptus trees. 

Sign directing us to trail to see Monarch butterflies

We set off.  After an ill-advised trek on a bumpy dirt road led us to  the San Pablo Yacht Club, not a Monarch in sight,  we got back in the car and found our way to Pt. Pinole.  We followed a well-marked trail to the trees where this year's migrants congregated. 

After about a mile, we found fifteen people, heads thrown way back, trying to see a couple of small Monarch clusters in high in a  tree.  A sign with an arrow indicated where to look up, but I could see nothing but two small patches of what looked like dark leaves.

Sign indicating where to look up

 An East Bay Parks naturalist had set up a camera on a tripod, and we got a good look at the clusters that way.  My own digital camera was useless--way inadequate zoom. A steady stream of gazers joined us.

This morning Jerry explained to me that entomologists have never figured out how the butterflies know where to migrate each fall. It's the grandparents of the current migrating generation who came last year, and those butterflies died long ago. The current crop had no guide to Pt. Pinole, they just knew where to show up.

The close-up of Monarch butterflies high in a tree

Happy Birthday, M!

Today is my sister's birthday.  She was a Thanksgiving baby, which accounted for my mother being missing when I got up on Thanksgiving morning, 1953.  I remember standing in the drafty garage of our brand-new tract house, and my dad telling me I had a baby sister.  I didn't know what to expect.  When we picked her up at the hospital, she cried in the car, and I said, "Send her back!"  Which would have been a big mistake.

Thanksgiving, 2011,  with a cake I brought from Berkeley

Some of her  pals lamented that they couldn't see her face in the grainy newspaper photo I posted earlier this week, so here's a picture of her taken a year later.  She was in the first grade when my mother made this dress, which featured blue cherry fabric and an organdyhalf-apron worn over the dress.  I had a matching one. 

c. 1960

Hey, thanks!

If you read my blog regularly: thank you.  I love having an audience, and I hope I don't sound too much like Andy Rooney, ranting on about bottle openers and how you're supposed to eat an ice cream cone. I used to think,  "Just how much do we need to know about one person's off-the-wall opinions?"  Ditto blog.

We're off to San Jose for dinner with my sister. It's supposed to be an indoor picnic. Yesterday she called because she couldn't find a package of  real linen tablecloths she stores under her bed. I'm assuming that means it's going to be fancier than I thought, but I'm wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

Happy T-giving.

Nursery University

That's the title of a documentary we watched last night, and I recommend it unless you're a person who doesn't like to shout at the screen.

The filmmakers follow five families as they try to get their three-year olds into Manhattan nursery schools.  There's been a baby boom in Manhattan over the past ten years, and competition is fierce to get kids into the nursery schools that feed into the right private elementary schools,  right on up to Harvard.  Parents grovel, connive, and donate to get their child into one of the top schools,  most of which cost $20,000 a year.

I liked the family of color whose child got into the Mandell Nursery School with a scholarship and the Greenwich Village family who opted out of the rat race and put their daughter into a co-op nursery.  I did not like the highly competitive investment banker whose adorable daughter got into seven schools.  I was neutral on the single mom who had twins at 57 (yes!). And the overentitled mother who says she's always gotten everything she wanted, but couldn't get her kid into City and Country Nursery School and so moved to Boston?  Whatever.

A personal note:  Without a doubt, I would not have been accepted at any of these schools.  One show of separation anxiety, my bete noire,  at the interview, and you're out.  A tantrum?  Forget it.  A dad who brags about affiliation with a college he didn't really have much to do with?  No go. The director calls to check.

I went to the San Jose State nursery school affiliated with the Home Economics department.  I remember the row of little toilets and the constant washing of hands.   My sister  didn't go at all, but managed to get a graduate degree.  Those were the old days.

Not For Public Consumption

I've been watching the PBS American Masters special on Woody Allen, and God, I find him refreshing.  Death!  Anxiety! Hypochondria! Death!  Remember that scene in "Hannah and Her Sisters," when he is so relieved to find out he doesn't have a brain tumor that he leaps along the sidewalk and then stops dead (no pun) realizing that one day it will be bad news?  Oh, Woody!

Shelves 2 and 3 

  I've got an out-of-the-way bookshelf in my studio with books pertaining to my own personal obsessions, which overlap with some of Allen's. Shelf 1:  Death and Anxiety  ("Dying at Home," "The Heal Your Anxiety Workbook,").  Shelf 2: Travel guides, always more than one for any locality because you never know what could go wrong. I've seen a documentary about Woody Allen in Venice and he is very anxious about water and boats and canals.  A definite tie-in.  Shelf 3:  Biographies and memoirs of first ladies, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt.  I'm at a loss here re Woody, although I would love it if he did a time-travel number on Pat Nixon.

The other day a contractor I've known for a long time was in my studio checking out leaky windows.  I saw him studying the shelves.

"Ah, Liz, I see you're interested in first ladies, " he said.  He is a very progressive Berkeley liberal.  "Laura Bush?"

I doubt Woody would have been chagrined, but I was.  He reveals the damndest things about himself, and people find them entertaining, maybe because they think he's more neurotic than they are.  I wonder.  In the meantime, Shelves 1-3 stay upstairs and pretty much out of sight.

The 1958 Caddie

Yes, this is us. My mother, me, and my sister  accepting the keys for a 1958 Cadillac we won at a gas station.   The San Jose State prof-- that would be my father--is nowhere in evidence.  He might have had to teach that day (or he might have thought that art professors should not be seen with Cadillacs.).

There was no question of us keeping the car, but my mother dressed up in her fake fur stole, and my sister and I put on matching fuzzy knit hats with our school dresses and patent leather shoes, and off we went for the publicity photo.

The actual car we won was red, with fins, and the proceeds from its sale became the seed money for a trip to England the following summer. My mother hadn't seen her family since 1947, when she emigrated to marry my father, whom she'd met in London during World War II.

Family lore.