Happy Birthday, Katie!

Here's little Katie (l) showing her sense of humor at an early age.

And here she is (r) feeding sugar pops cereal to the cranky rooster, Snowball, in the back yard in Bismarck. She loved to get up early in those days to play outside.



Here are Tom, Peggy, Katie, and Sally dyeing Easter eggs. I brought the picnic table inside during the winter and set it up in the big kitchen so the kids would have a place to color and paint and cut out things.

Katie enjoyed it especially, I think. She's now a working artist. This is her bio from an exhibit in Arizona.



Here are the lovely Katie and her siblings, left to right, Peggy, Sally, and Tom at Katie's wedding to Al Abdou. They have a strong bond formed in the days when they were each other's only playmates in our house in the Missouri River bottomland in Bismarck, North Dakota.



So, happy birthday, dear Katie. May light shine on and through you.

Global Warming 2006

Visiting the Botanical Garden teaches you, among other things, that our planet Earth has undergone many climatic changes in her life. It's gotten really WARM and then really COLD (and/or vice versa) and now it seems to be getting WARM again. Our little flower bed out front produced the first daffodils of winter, 2006, this past week. And here they are.

Last week as Cathy and I were walking from work to Union Station, we saw a butterfly! And here that is, too, if you can see it...it's hanging from the yellow dandelion in the center of this photo. Follow the row of bricks at the edge of the lawn, and just to the right of the metal grillwork on the right hand window, you'll see a blur of yellow. That's where it is.


Here's a wee version of it....can't do any better than this, sorry.

Visit to the Botanical Garden

This week it turns out my nose was dripping like a faucet, and I was too germy to travel anywhere. So I stayed home, and yesterday, when I was feeling a bit better, Cathy persuaded me to visit the Botanical Garden. I haven't really been inside the BG since they renovated it, and so I've missed all the new things. Maybe their Christmas display is not new, but I'd never seen it before. Very cool! Here's the little train outside the entrance. Notice the National Christmas tree off in the distance to the right. It seems pretty skinny this year. I'll go back when I have a real camera....these photos were taken with my Sidekick pager....but here's a taste of their wonderful display.


Inside, there are miniature models of many famous Washington buildings. I think the one on the left side of this photo behind the trains is part of the Capitol building, but maybe not. Maybe it's the old post office building downtown (which is now a mall, kind of). Or maybe it's, if you'll pardon the expression, the White House in an earlier brown phase??

The place was FULL of people, many of whom were quite short, noisy, and sticky, and everyone was having a good time. I have a degree in Biology but never had to take a class in Botany, more's the pity. Going to the Botanical Garden now is better than taking a class, though. What class has a squad of supremely knowledgeable docents on hand? Miscellaneous display tidbit: Flowering plants appeared 130 million years ago! Charles Darwin said their appearance on this planet was an "abominable mystery." Why he called it "abominable," I don't know, because flowering plants are one of this planet's great glories. Maybe he was ticked off because he couldn't figure out why they showed up. Or maybe it's because there's very little in the fossil record of the ancestors of flowering plants. Which figures....flowers have a very brief life cycle and are quite fragile. It's not like someone was back there pressing violets in a book.


Here's a model of the Smithsonian Castle. I was just inside the full sized Castle last weekend and learned that Smithson, who founded the Smithsonian Institution, died in Italy. When they brought his remains back to D.C. to be interred at the Institution, one of the Smithsonian's board members was Alexander Graham Bell. Bell and his deaf wife, Mabel, went to Italy to accompany Smithson's remains on the sea voyage, and there's a lovely big photo in the Castle lobby of the huge ocean liner that carried their party.

The Festivus Pole

I was reading the Huffington Post tonight about the Governor of Wisconsin having a Festivus Pole. Since I had never heard of Festivus (not being a Seinfeld junkie), I looked it up in Wikipedia.

Well! My Christmas tree substitute is not all aluminum exactly, and it's a tarted up, over-commercialized version--I even picked up some tinsel-like garlands for it (pretty much invisible in this arty photo shot in the appealingly dim lights of the twinkle bulbs, but you can make out tiny specks of tinsel next to the small specks of the lights)--but I'd say it could be called a Festivus Pole.

Wikipedia also listed the traditions of Festivus, the first being The Airing of Grievances. Offspring #1 wrote in her blog yesterday that Offspring #3, whose birthday is inconveniently close to Christmas, was always and forever getting Christmas presents that made do as birthday presents, too. This is a timely example of The Airing of Grievances at Festivus. Way to go, #1! That reminds me....please tell #3 that the Christmas present she got the other day is also her birthday present. Whew! Nearly forgot to mention that!!

The last Festivus tradition is Wrestling the Head of the Family to the Ground. To which I say, Bring it on!!!

A Very Merry Christmas!!

Joyeux Noel, etc., from the little condo on Q Street NW. This Christmas Eve found me scrambling around for last-minute pressies to take to Rachael & Matt's tomorrow and realizing I did NOT have a tree--again. I was quite sure I had an artificial tree in the basement storage area, but non...it was just a tree stand, which requires an actual Christmas tree.

So I went back upstairs and got out the ladder again, wrapped it in lights, dashed to The Sixth Day, a wonderful, accommodating, and ecologically perfect flower shop on the corner of P and 21st that is going out of business next month (thanks to the enormous increases in shop rent here in DC). I bought two gorgeous poinsettias and one cyclamen--the one on the top of the ladder--and installed them on the wee tower of lights.

The result? A joyous celebration of the mundane: a step ladder, three plants, two strings of lights.

Merry Christmas to all!

EVERYDAY HEROES!! You rock, Helen & Andrew, Jeanne & Jim, Sarah!

Here's to all my rellies out there in Chicagoland who are actually doing something for the planet and their own children!! Makes an old bat proud. What do the people look like who are making the world a better place for their children? Take a look:

Jim and Jeanne at the baptism of Gabey.


Auntie Sarah with Mia.


Helen with Mia.


Dads and babies: Andrew and Jim with Mia and Gabey.

Helen and Andrew (Sarah, too? Jeanne and Jim, too?) wrote letters on behalf of the Illinois area Sierra Club's campaign to reduce coal plant mercury pollution.

Here's the result:

BLAGOJEVICH MERCURY CLEANUP PLAN GAINS FINAL APPROVAL
Illinois Responds to Weak Bush Administration Proposal With Strongest Plan In America - Cut 90% of Coal Plant Mercury by 2009

Statement of Jack Darin, Director, Sierra Club, Illinois Chapter
December 12, 2006

With today's approval by the Illinois General Assembly's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Governor Blagojevich's proposal to cut 90% of the mercury pollution coming out of Illinois coal plants by 2009 will go into effect. This is a historic victory to dramatically reduce a dangerous neurotoxin that threatens the brains and nervous systems of Illinois children.

Illinois women should not have to worry that the tuna fish sandwich they have for lunch, or the fish they put on the family dinner table may cause permanent harm to their children. Most of this mercury pollution comes from coal-burning power plants that have not installed the pollution controls that can eliminate most of the threat to our children. Now they will finally clean up their act to protect our
kids.

This cleanup plan will not only protect Illinois children, it also sets an example for America to follow. States can and must do better than the Bush Administration's proposal to go slow and easy in requiring mercury pollution controls, and Illinoisans can be proud that this proposal is the strongest of any state's response.

This ruling is a major public health victory. This mercury cleanup plan will protect future generations of Illinois children from the very serious dangers posed by mercury contamination. It is a major step forward towards the day when Illinois can hopefully lift the health warnings currently posted about the dangers of eating certain fish from every lake and river in our state.

We applaud the leadership of Governor Blagojevich, Director of Policy Development Steven Frenkel, Illinois Environmental Protection Agency Director Doug Scott, and all of the IEPA staff, including Laurel Kroack, Jim Ross, Chris Romaine, and many others, for their hard work over the past year in enacting this historic pollution cleanup plan.

The Sierra Club's Illinois Clean Air Campaign, led by Verena Owen, has been working in Illinois to create awareness about the threats posed by mercury contamination, and to promote solutions such as this proposal for many years. Our volunteers and staff offered free hair testing events across Illinois, where concerned people could check their own levels and get involved in the cleanup campaign. We reached out to Illinoisans at fishing and hunting shows, health and environmental fairs, and concerts to engage people across the state in promoting this solution. We went door to door in communities uniquely impacted by mercury pollution. We worked with the Blagojevich Administration at key points along the way to develop
and support the proposal.

We are proud of our work, but the real winners today are the children of tomorrow. We look forward to the day when Illinois women don't have to worry that the food they eat or put on the dinner table may be putting their children at risk. Today's action means those days may be numbered.

Congratulations, Helen & Andrew, especially! Don't ever think that one small person won't count. Write those letters, make those phone calls, join those marches. Just do it!! It works!

Darling Lida

Lida Moser, who is 86 years old, entices me out to all sorts of arty events here. On this day, we are visiting the open house at the new Swedish Embassy on the Georgetown waterfront.



Lida is full of wonder at beauty wherever she sees it. "This is fabulous," she's saying in a room full of silver jewelry and utensils made by Swedish artisans. "This is simply marvelous."



She charms everyone she meets, especially other artists (here, with an architect at the Swedish Embassy), with her curiosity and interest in their life and work. She calls people "darling," and they eat it up. (I eat it up. Like Snoopy says, "Nobody calls me 'darling'.")

Lida spent most of her adult life as a photographer in New York City. She worked for Vogue, wrote a photography column for the New York Times, and early on worked as an assistant to Berenice Abbott. Lida is more famous elsewhere than she is here. The National Gallery of Scotland purchased all of her photos of Scottish writers and intellectuals. And the National Gallery of Quebec published her photographs of the province of Quebec. She took these in 1950 while on commission from Vogue to create an illustrated report of Canada from coast to coast.

She has great flair for dressing simply, in rich colors. She has retired from full-time photography, but she has taken up drawing. I met her at the Art Students League in New York City in 1997. She dropped in on a class in anatomical drawing one morning, and she gave me a beautiful smile when she sat down. After class, I stopped by her station to say hello. Her drawings blew me away. They are wild and wonderful. Best of all, she saves her sketches and uses them as stationery. Here is her New Year's greeting from 2005. It's written on a drawing of a dancer she did in October, 2003. I've edited out the part about her ill health then. She was very frail at the beginning of 2005 but has since bounced back.



For a great review of Lida's work by her friend and fellow artist Lenny Campello, check out BlogCritics Magazine.

Gettin' old is hard to do....

My oldest daughter has a new post on her blog about the cruelties of aging (not those exact words, but you get the idea). I was going to comment there, but as I got going, I realized it was gonna be too long for that. So I'm making my comments here.

Peggy, I took one look at my once beautiful stomach a few hours after you were born, and it was all caved in and lumpy like a punkin that had been sitting out on the porch too long. I decided then and there that it was going to be pretty shocking to see what life would do to my body so I would just put it all out of my mind. Nuts to it. No cosmetics company has ever gotten rich off my trade.

Getting older, however, is one of the very best things that's ever happened to me. I've loved every minute in the sun and wind that have dried the hell out of my skin (if you know many old women from North Dakota, almost all of our faces have that dried apple effect because it's dry and windy out there, and unless you dunk your face in vaseline every day, it'll get that way).

I've loved every single drop of wine and gin and tonic that has ever made its way down my gullet, and all the Kentucky Fried Chicken (man, there's a monster--all that trans fat!) and grandma's potato salad, Aunt Joyce's German chocolate cake and Aunt Mary Ellen's rum cake, too. I loved having four babies, even though all the eating, drinking, and procreating has wrecked my boobs and my stomach, and the babies' appreciation of my finer qualities is a bit wobbly.

I've never really had the time or inclination to do situps and all of that stuff, although I have at various times done yoga daily, or run 3 miles every other day, or gone swimming over my lunch hour, but not right now. Now all I'm doing is walking as much as I can (not much) and trying to keep from falling over when the bus lurches. One of my girlfriends used to go to the gym religiously and lift weights and all of that. I challenged her to arm wrestle one time after listening to her brag about her great strength. I pinned her arm so fast she didn't even have time to blink. Where did I get this strength if not in the gym, she wanted to know? Hauling babies (you were not walking yet when Sally was born, so I had to carry both of you at times), chopping wood, shoveling snow (LOTS AND LOTS OF SNOW). I sold our dishwasher one time in Bismarck because it was a portable model and the damn thing was always in the way. A nice grey-haired couple came in their station wagon to pick it up. The guy asked me if my husband was around to help. "No, sorry....He's in Williston this week," I said. They both looked worried, and I said, "I'll take it out to the car." And I did. The guy turned to his wife and said, "That's the strongest woman I ever saw."

I still have red hair and a hot temper, but I'm not as wild as I used to be. I haven't heard music for almost as long as you have lived on this planet, but I still like to sing. (And I wonder just what the hey is wrong with people who CAN hear music but are still all tied up in knots over their insults and injuries. It's better for us if we can be grateful for small favors.)

I had cataract surgery a few months back, and I am still seeing double, especially when I wear my glasses. In fact, sometimes I see four lines of closed captioned dialogue on the teevee. Gee. But so what? I am as happy as a pig in mud when I can see a star at night.

Cathy says I'm the youngest person in the office. (That probably means least mature...) There are some days when I can't remember squat, but then I go to a museum like last Sunday and see an old bible from the 8th century and realize I can not only see the Latin, I can read it!

Getting old IS different. We arrive on this planet kinda gradually, and most of us leave the same way. A knee goes here, a bunch of decibels go there. Be glad you're alive, honey, and go have a nice drink of something to celebrate your wonderful existence. Cuz once you die, it all stops, the good and the bad. You told me once wot the Scots say..."Yer a long time dead." (And ha....you haven't even gone through menopause yet....)

Tagged!

My oldest daughter, Peggy, has tagged me. (Thanks a lot, kid...) This means I have to write a blog telling six weird things about me. (Excuse me while I laugh my head off....). Then I have to tag six other bloggers, who have to do likewise...and so it goes. I don't KNOW six other bloggers personally. Maybe Mad Cabbie, but we've never met. And that's weird. I'll tag some of the Midwesterners and will post their stuff here cuz most of them do not have blogs.

1. I almost never answer my phone. On the day we left for France, Cathy was at my place encouraging me to pack faster, and the phone rang. She said "Your phone is ringing." I said, "Gee," and kept on packing. She said "How do you answer it?" (It's a special tty phone for deafies.) I said, "Pick it up and say hello." She did, and then she said somethingsomething and hung up. I said, "Who was it?" She said, "The Sierra Club." and I said, "See....that's why I don't answer it. It's always a telemarketer." Only three people ever call me on the phone to talk, and they always know to leave a message on the voice mail (which requires another TTY or a relay operator). I live in a parallel universe, and that's weird.

2. I can recite the first 10 lines of the Odyssey in Greek. I almost never do this when I'm sober.

3. In the convent I played the bass horn in our little German-type band--polkas, waltzes, schottisches..."Freut euch des Lebens, weil noch das Lämpchen glüht; pflücket die Rose, eh' sie verblüht!" Fun on those hot summer nights in St. Paul puffing on our horns and sweating under 3 yards of wool serge and a yard more of linen and voile around our heads.

4. I love to sing old show tunes. E.g., "I'm just a girl who can't say no. I'm in a terrible fix...." Like that. Cathy knows all the words to everything, and I can at least remember the tunes if they came out before the early 60s, so we sing in the car. Fun.

5. One time I ate a miller (you know, those big fat moths that hang out in cotoneaster bushes). There are LOTS of cotoneaster hedges in North Dakota and thus lots of millers flapping around. All my babies, when they crawled, used to grab them off the porch floor, stuff them in their mouths, and chew on them. I'd fish them out of their mouths and wonder why they seemed to enjoy them so. So I popped one in my mouth one time, too, and chewed. The teeny tiny scales on the outside were not pleasant...sort of like tasteless talcum powder, but once I got past the scales and into the meat, it tasted like....a cashew! Yum!

6. Peggy got her laundry folding obsession from me. I don't like the way anyone else folds my stuff. I did change how I folded my towels, though, after I visited Peggy the first time in England. Now I do the three-fold like she does.

Here we go, girls!!

"The Community at the Altar"



www.romancatholicwomenpriests.org

Check it out!

A few days in Paris, 2006

They hung up the big Christmas wreaths at Union Station just before we left for our trip. The weather is about the same in D.C. at this time of year as it is in Paris.



Here is the birthday girl greeting Peggy and George in front of the open kitchen window shortly after their arrival to the apartment on Rue des Abbesses. Notice the faint glow of the Tour Eiffel over Peggys' left ear?



Friday, my birthday, went by in a blur, and I was just too tired from going without sleep for 24 hours to take photos, but the next day, Cathy, George, and I headed to the Musee des Plats Reliefs at Les Invalides. What a place that was! "Plats Reliefs" means relief maps. They are miniature models of the French forts and fortified villages along the Atlantic coast north and west of Paris, including Mont St. Michel. The plats reliefs were commissioned by Napoleon and one of the Louis kings in the 1700s, and their existence was kept as a closely guarded military secret until 1950, when they were put on public display. There is a whole floor of these maps on enormous glass-covered tray-like tables in the attic of one of the wings of Les Invalides. Little houses, trees, fences, chicken coops...everything on 1/600" scale. Here are Cathy and George out in front before we went in, with our pal the Eiffel Tower as a back drop. We could really see here how much Pierre L'Enfant was influenced by Paris when he drew the designs for the city of D.C. Except D.C. doesn't have as many cannons around. There is, however, a famous iron fence just a couple blocks from me in Georgetown that is made out of the barrels of left-over Revolutionary war muskets. It's very similar to iron fences we saw around some of the public buildings on our way to Les Invalides.



This is the dome of Les Invalides church, which is right over the tomb of Napoleon. The French are sure crazy about Napoleon, and we were trying to figure out why. He got a bunch of them killed in his wars, and he lost at Waterloo and had to go into exile. I said at one point that I thought it was because he was handsome, but Cathy scoffed at that. I read someplace that he reformed the French educational system and reformed the laws, etc. Was that enough to earn his popularity? I still say it was because he was good looking and set about to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world at that time. In the 18th century, that's probably saying a whole lot.



This is becoming an M.E. tradition: me in Paris grinning like an ape and blinking at the last second. So here it is: Eyes Wide Shut 2006. (Note to office mates...the bag contains some of the gifties I bought for you and have since misplaced. I really did have them!) (Notice the coat, Debbie? It's now 23 years old and still one of my favorite things.)



Sunday morning, here are Cathy, George, and Peggy heading toward the entrance queue to get into the Louvre. The queue moved right along, and we were inside in no time. What a marvel I.M. Pei's underground entrance is! The glass pyramid above lets in abundant natural light, and the whole thing WORKS!



There is lots of stuff outside in the big courtyard. Here's Louis XIV, the Sun King. I don't think he really looked like that, do you?



The first exhibit Cathy and I visited at the Louvre was "Rembrandt's Drawings." Every artist I know has a sketch book, and about 1/4 of the way into this exhibit, I said, "These drawings are from Rembrandt's sketchbook! He must be having a good laugh up there in heaven with all his artist pals--'Hey, look! They're paying good money to see my drawing scraps!!'." We did pay good money--8 euros apiece--to see this exhibit and the William Hogarth exhibit next to it. The Louvre is free on the first Sunday of each month, but the special exhibits are not included in that largesse. Still, who can put a price tag on seeing something like this? The brochure for this exhibit says that this simple drawing is a magnificent study in light. Rembrandt could capture the present moment with a few strokes of his pen. Seeing these drawings up close is a spiritual experience.



The Winged Victory of Samothrace receiving homage. I was already in sensory overload, so this is the only other photo I took inside the Louvre. Next time I go back, I'll have a proper camera and go nuts. It was time to head back to Montmartre for our last lunch together.



George at Sancerre listening politely and dreaming of falafel.



Peggy at Sancerre enjoying the atmosphere.



And Cathy enjoying the conversation.



Lunch. Peggy said it was "cheese and wine soaked." Yes, indeed...this is Paris!!


Postscript
Josephine O'Leary, the first deaf Fulbright scholar from Ireland at Gallaudet University, was going to join Cathy and me on Sunday afternoon, also, but rotten weather closed down the Dublin airport completely until at least Monday morning, so she decided to reschedule her trip for later. Here she is at NAD camp in 2001 with her lively charges.



So sorry you couldn't make it, Jo. Peggy and George had a taste of bad weather, too. Their flight was late taking off, and the pilot had to abort the first landing attempt at Newcastle because of the high winds. Thanks be, his second try was good, but the Races didn't get home until after 10:30 p.m.

An Open Mind Is the Best Way to View the World....

HSBC, which calls itself "the world's local bank," has a series of wonderful ads in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. They show contrasting views of the same things. All of the ads lead off with the sentence, "An open mind is the best way to view the world." (That's what their website says, anyway. According to my fractured French, the ad here says "To be open to the world is to comprehend the differences in points of view.")

This one shows a young woman looking up from her studies. Is she concentrating hard on a particularly bright idea? Or is she daydreaming as a way to avoid studying?

My favorite is the one with two apples, each with a bite out of it. one apple is labeled "FORBIDDEN," and the other apple is labeled "RECOMMENDED."

Another shows two pictures each of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and two of an ancient sculpture of a male torso. the pictures alternate with these labels: (tower) IMPERFECT, (torso) PERFECT, (tower) PERFECT, (torso) IMPERFECT. Depending on your point of view, the Tower of Pisa is either imperfect (it's LEANING, for pete's sake!) or so perfect that despite shifts in the soil, it's still standing. The torso is either a perfect work of art from times past, or a dusty old statue with chips and cracks.

What a great insight, especially for a person coming from Gallaudet, where deafness is experienced as PERFECT by some and IMPERFECT by others.

I'll try to get my own photographs of these ads so I can include them here. (Well, I did get one, but it killed my batteries, and by the time I found batteries in the airport, the ads were on the inaccessible other side of the security checkpoint.)

A Happy Birthday

Peggy, George, and Cathy have combined to make yesterday my happiest 70th birthday ever. Peggy didn't get her warmth and her sensitivity from me, especially regarding birthdays. I forget as many as I remember, and I never held actual birthday parties for the kids involving guests outside of the family. She's blossomed on her own. Thanks, Peggy, for all the birthday treats: the "birthday girl" badge (which--typically--I refused to pin on), the little happy birthday confetti things sprinkling the plate of delicious pastries, the swell presents: the beautiful sweater, the cool perfume (from George and Henry), Thank you, Peggy, for flying over from Scotland and helping to make my 70th birthday one of the best I've ever had. Thanks to George, too, for coming along. What a treat it was to have this bright, sensitive, happy 13-year-old here. Thanks, also, George, for reminding us that fish, chickens, cows, pigs, and sheep (escargots, too) are our FRIENDS and not just something to eat.

Thanks to Cathy for the best 200 euro birthday lunch ever at A La Pomponette, and for sharing the mundane costs of this trip--the tickets from USA, the rental on this apartment for six days--without which it all would not have happened. And thanks for your wonderful friendship and love that light up my days at the salt mine and beyond.

Thanks to all for being your fabulous selves and for being in my life. What a blessing!