Category: Family

A Visit to Oaxaca, Mexico

My husband and I had a marvelous trip to Oaxaca, which is nearly the southernmost state in Mexico (only Chiapas stretches farther south). We were there for a week with five days of touring and a couple days on our own. The scenery is stark (it’s very desert-like), but the city of Oaxaca and the Oaxaqueños who live there are wonderful.

I love murals and so many of the ones I saw were brilliant. These were indoors in a shopping area.

While we were there, the state of Oaxaca celebrated Dia de la Samaritana, or Good Samaritan’s Day, which falls on the fourth Friday of Lent. In addition to the decorations everywhere, people gave out “agua fresca” (fresh water), which is water flavored with fresh fruits, herbs, flowers and other ingredients. We had horchata that day. The “Papel Picado” (the paper decorations) were so lovely.

Another part of Oaxacan culture that I absolutely fell in love with were the alebrijes (ah-lay-bree-hiss). These are carved figurines made of wood that are painted bright colors in fantastical designs. The ones below are from a museum exhibit of the work of Manuel Jiménez. He popularized the wooden alebrijes.

I bought way too many alebrijes at the artisan markets. Some were for family, but most were just for me. This one with the cat family sitting on a bench is my favorite. <heart emoji>

I have a ton more pictures (like of the wedding parade we became impromptu members of), but it would take many more newsletters to show them off. I don’t want to put you all to sleep, lol. Suffice it to say, it was a fabulous trip.

Some of you reading this might remember my science fiction trilogy, Tankborn, Awakening, and Rebellion. I now have a new series planned that’s a spin-off of the world of the Tankborn books. The first book, Mishalla’s Courage, is published and the second book, Pheno’s Treachery, will be available later this year.

Click here to order Mishalla’s Courage as an eBook for the device of your choice. It’s also available at that link as an audio book and as a print book edition with color illustrations.

I’m planning five more novellas, all featuring new characters introduced in Mishalla’s Courage. So you’ll want to get started now with the first book.

August 6, 2025
7th Grade Memories

Back when I first entered kindergarten, my mom did mild bit of forgery on my hospital birth certificate to get me into school a year early. So, I was 4 when I started kindergarten, 5 starting 1st grade, 6 at the beginning of 2nd, etc. I was a smarty-pants, so I did pretty well, spending all 7 years of K-6 in the same school.

If you’ve done the math with me, you’ll know I started 7th grade as an 11-year-old. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I’d gone on to the local junior high with my friends. But the summer between 6th and 7th, we moved from Los Angeles County to the San Bernardino Mountains. I would have to start those most agonizing school years, junior high, in a new school where I knew no one. Even worse, the school I would be attending was a diabolical experiment called a “junior-senior” high school (7th through 12th grade). Okay, it wasn’t diabolical. There weren’t enough students for two schools. But still, that was a lot for a nerdette like me to face.

I was positively geekish as an 11-year-old. I wasn’t too great at personal hygiene, knew zilch about makeup, was awkward and a little pudgy. I remember taking a stab at shaving my legs one morning before school, except I only had time to shave one. So I went to school with one hairy and one not.

So, not any kind of popular. Rubbing elbows with a bunch of cruel, haughty 13- and 14-year-old 8th graders was enough of a challenge, let alone those lofty high schoolers.

Luckily, the older ones ignored me as being beyond notice. The teachers adored me, since I was a Good Student. And there were a few students in my age group, the ones who walk with the angels, who were kind to me, even if they weren’t actually friends. A couple of the nicest were cheerleaders, so you can dump that stereotype.

But there were the mean girls, as there always are. They took such delight in embarrassing and belittling me. They were definitely not cheerleaders. There was nothing cheerful about them.

I sometimes wonder what happened to my tormentors. Maybe they married ugly guys and got fat. Maybe they had an epiphany and realized the error of their ways and were nice forevermore. Ah, I can dream.

So, worst high school memory–looking forward for weeks to the field trip to Disneyland, then getting hit with a horrible flu the day we were supposed to go. I went anyway and was miserable the whole time.

Best high school memory–dissecting a mink (long dead and preserved in formaldehyde–and no, today I would never buy/wear an animal fur of any kind). My lab partner and I decided to focus on the skeleton. When it took too long to cut the meat off the bones, I took the leg home to work on it there. Mom got the great idea to boil it on the stove in water. We boiled and boiled without effect until Mom got the idea to add bleach to the water. Extremely dangerous, but boy, did it work. Nothing but bones left after just a minute or so. Don’t try this at home!

Long story short, I was able to reconstruct a beautiful mink leg skeleton model (okay, there were some teeny tiny bones I threw away cuz I didn’t know where they went). My biology teacher was so enamored with the skeletal leg, he confiscated it. 😠 Sigh, all these years later, I still regret that he never gave it back.

December 8, 2022
New Skills = New Responsibility

Have you ever tried cooking something new (and a bit challenging) and it turns into a household staple? And when it becomes a must-have, you’re having to make that not-so-new thing again and again because your spouse or your kids (or you!) would be very disappointed without it?

I suspect were all trying new things with the pandemic shutdown. The staying-home-all-the-time part isn’t new to me because writing has been my day job for quite some time now. I’m used to working in front of a computer in my home office. But until the pandemic shutdown hit, I never had to worry about how I looked from the shoulders up or how the background looked via my webcam.

My new skill that led to a new responsibility was making homemade English muffins. I came across this recipe in the Washington Post back in March 2020 and thought I’d give it a try. My husband especially likes English muffins for breakfast so I thought it would be a nice treat for him.

I’ve been baking bread for years, so this wasn’t a huge stretch. But after the first batch, hubby definitely wanted more. He said he could just buy store bought, but I knew he would be much happier eating the homemade ones made him. So that one experiment has become an every other week (or so) ritual when hubby tells me, “I’ve only got two left. Can you make more?”

It’s become a nice cooperative effort. He’s never made bread, so I make the dough and let it rise in the fridge overnight. The next day, we work together to measure out the 12 blobs of dough that will become muffins. I put a blob on our kitchen scale and he shapes it on the cornmeal covered cookie sheet. Then after another 2-hour rise, he cooks the muffins in our electric skillet.

Over the 2+ years since we started our muffin making venture, I’ve modified the recipe. We use our electric skillet instead of the cast iron pan the recipe calls for because we ended up with burned muffins. Hubby isn’t super fond of whole wheat or honey, so I switched to rye muffins sweetened with sugar and flavored with caraway seeds. I’ve also gotten lazy and rather than the egg white called for in the recipe, I throw in a whole egg.

I’ve also started to make other breads more regularly. My favorite is olive bread, my version of a tasty bread we used to buy at the Bel Air market. I use Peter Reinhart’s lean bread recipe from his book Artisan Breads Every Day, and add 3/4 cup of sliced kalamata olives and substitute 1/2 cup of the olive brine for some of the water. It is divine.

Did you start something new during the shutdown? Let me know in the comments.

July 26, 2022
Aww, Go Fly a Kite

Well, it seemed like a great idea at the time. Go to the park and fly kites. The breeze was pretty brisk in DC today, and the nearby soccer field wasn’t in use, so a great opportunity to get the kites into the air.

Oh, and did I mention the tall trees lining one side of the soccer field? I’ll get to those in a moment.

My granddaughter was having some trouble getting her smaller kite into the air, so her dad helped her get the larger kite up. She was doing great. She got it up so high she was at the end of the string, and both the kite and my granddaughter were proud and happy. I was meanwhile doing my best to get her little one to fly, but did I mention I suck at flying kites?

This next part wasn’t my fault at all, though. Really, it was the wind’s fault. The wind and physics. The pull of the kite got so strong that it pulled the handle of the string holder right out of my granddaughter’s hand. My son took off after the handle as it scooted along the grass. But he wasn’t fast enough.

One of the trees lining the field was plenty fast though. It snatched up the yellow handle of the kite’s string holder, and zip, pulled it about twenty feet up into the branches (okay, the wind pulled it, not the tree). Next thing you know, the tree is flying the kite, not us. Nor did the tree seem inclined to give the kite back.

So, now the conundrum. How do we unhook the handle from the tree branch without losing the whole thing, kite, string, and all? Luckily, along came a man who’d come to walk his dog and we conscripted him onto the CSI: Kite Rescue Edition team. With his help, we tossed the other kite’s string over the branch where the yellow handle was caught. Unfortunately, although we could jiggle the branch, we couldn’t get the yellow handle to work free.

Then I noticed a few PVC poles with soccer flags on one end and a metal stake on the other. With the assistance of the dog walker, we cobbled together three poles and by pulling the branch lower with the other string, we got the yellow handle free. Unfortunately, the rest of the string was still caught in the tree.

So now we were controlling the kite, more or less, but further unfortunately, we apparently couldn’t fly the kite as well as the tree could. The kite stuttered in the sky, then gave up the ghost, falling into a tree across the street. We were about to go over and ask the homeowner to give us a call when the kite fell when I suggested we cut the string so we could get it out of the tree.

Once the tension in the string was gone, the kite started sliding out of the tree. By the time we ran across the street, the kite had fallen on the roof of a neighboring house. While we watched, it slowly slid down the roof into my son’s hand.

At that point, I think the kite said, “I meant to do that.” It might have even snickered a little about how well the tree had kept it in the air. Although it did admit my granddaughter had done a pretty good job flying it too.

It took a while to reel in all that string. As we headed home we pretty much laughed all the way.

The kite wasn’t the least bit apologetic.

May 8, 2016
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Family Vacation Photos Ahead!

If pretty pictures of scenery bore you to tears, just click on that X in the corner of your screen. If you’re willing to look at gorgeous vistas and me looking particularly awkward on a horse (even though I really ought to know how to ride), scroll on.

The Three Sisters, seen from our condo’s balcony.

It was our son’s and daughter-in-law’s idea to do a combined family trip (the grandkids, their parents and both sets of grandparents). Since we all live in hot summer locales, a trip to somewhere cooler seemed like a good idea. So Alberta, Canada rather than, say, Arizona was the destination of choice. The Northern California contingent left behind triple digit heat in exchange for temperatures that never topped the mid-8os. That’s a vacation destination.

Yes, I own a horse and ride often. Maybe I just look so confused because it’s a Canadian horse.

My son’s goal was for us to “see pretty things” in particular in as many modes as possible. We therefore hiked, biked, drove, rode horses, gondolas, and ski lifts, were transported by buses with gargantuan wheels (those that visited the nearby glacier), took a tour boat, canoed, and hiked some more. We ate–a lot–and didn’t skimp on desserts. For instance, the best ice cream in the world can be found at Cows in Banff.

We also had a great opportunity to see various critters. There was the grizzly bear we saw below us while we were on the Banff Gondola. There were also elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, various birds, and a particularly vicious chipmunk.

Happy to be viewing this big fellow from the gondola rather than up close and personal.

This chunky, over-friendly fellow (he climbed on my lap) is an example of what happens when you feed the wildlife. Big fines for that sort of thing.

I’ve been told this is a Clark’s Nutcracker. Or it’s possibly a Black Beaked Fiffer Fluffer.

The view from the top of the Banff gondola where the chipmunk lives. Pretty jaw-dropping.

Also, we ignorant Americans learned a little something about Canadian history–namely that July 1st is Canada Day. We watched a great local parade in Canmore, and then oohed and aahed at fireworks afterward.

Fireworks with the Canadian Rockies as a backdrop. Well done, Canada. Well done.

July 14, 2015