it’s my cute boy’s birthday today* and i love him to pieces.
i am so very lucky that the universe saw fit to bring forth this lovely, wonderful guy who likes to dance in the kitchen, is constantly dreaming up new inventions, and lets me put my feet on him when we watch tv on the couch.
*technically, it was yesterday, but i was having a diabolical hissy fit with iphoto and my camera and failed to get a picture up yesterday.
I have a new niece!
Penelope Jane came to hang out with us last week, on Tuesday, October 11.
Penny Jane 9 lbs 5 oz 20 inches
That’s a baby alright!
She lives in Boston, so I won’t be meeting her in person for a really long time. That’s ok, though. She can use some percolating time to get more interesting first.
Since the time that The David and I met and started dating, we’ve gone from 0 nieces and nephews… to 5.
That’s 5 babies in 3 years and 4 months. His sister has had 2 girls and one of my brothers has begat 2 boys and this latest girl, Penny.
The David and I aren’t married, so even though his two nieces came before her, technically Penny is my first niece. She’s the first girl baby in my family.
I was thinking about “real” nieces and psuedo-we’re-not-married nieces. They feel mostly the same to me. Maybe a little different.
Do they start feeling more equal when you’re properly married? People are always saying that even though things are really the same on the surface, that it all feels different once you’re married. Maybe this is like that?
And then I was remembering being a kid with an assortment of aunt and uncle flavored relatives. Some of them were married in to being a relative of mine, but for the most part, those unions all took place before i was born. There wasn’t really a difference between Aunt Maureen and Uncle Roger to me.
And now, for the grown-up me, there’s also this element of feeling like I have to make an effort with the pseudo-in-laws. I care about whether or not they like me. So I want to treat the little English nieces like real nieces. Especially since if it were up to The David, he’d forget their birthdays, that they should get Christmas presents from their uncle in America, possibly even their names…
(Speaking of birthdays and Christmas presents… like I said, there are now 5. 5 little kids under the age of 3. What do you buy these people for gifts? Because Maggie does not know.)
Anyway. There’s a new Hannon. And she could go through the green glass door twice. Just like me.
<tiny earthquake>
<heads pop up from cubicles all over the place. like meerkats.>
“Earthquake?”
“Was that an earthquake?”
“To the Twitter!”
“Yes! It was an earthquake!”
“4.2!”
“In Berkeley!”
My darling little hipster coworker says “I didn’t feel anything!”
And I say “That’s because your pants are too tight.”
<everyone laughs>
<<he does wear really tight pants>>
“You all could be buried in rubble and on fire. My pants will protect me,” he pouts.
“Oh honey. You’ll be on fire, too. You just won’t feel it. Cause your pants are too tight.”
Filed under these are the days of my lives
It’s finally the good time of year here in the Bay Area. All golden glowy light and intense blue skies. Enjoying it so much!
last year on my birthday, I made some goals about what I was going to accomplish in the coming year.
1. No credit card debt
2. Lose “some” weight
3. Leave my gray hairs alone and refrain from pulling them out of my head.
And so, the gray hairs – not a single one yanked. In fact, I’ll say that there are more of those than there were a year ago, so… success!
Filed under these are the days of my lives
Yesterday, I turned thirty-four. And it was a Saturday. The convergence of the two led to feelings of a planned gathering.
So I planned, and they gathered… at Ocean Beach for a beach bonfire birthday. It was gloomy and it was blowy. It was misting and sand was swirling. But there was fire and everyone was appropriately bundled and despite being damp and very dirty, it was grand.
Some people left early and some people showed up quite late, so there was a nicely rotating mix of folk. There were hot dogs and s’mores and carafes of spiced wine.
And at the end, after all of our wood was burned away and I was hemming and hawing as to whether we should go get more or just be done with, a guy showed up with a tree’s worth of more wood and asked if we were about to done with our pit. He was on his own, just wanting to build a fire, so he joined our group and created a monstrous blaze which was really almost magical in the dark.
If I hadn’t managed to turn the tide from pleasantly tipsy to distressingly, spinningly drunk right there at the very end, it actually would have been just about perfect. So I kind of ruined my Sunday a little bit, but the birthday itself was just really nice.
all the people
hot dog
me
the david
sunset on the pacific
bi and stephanie
kite flying
ali and sloane
emiliana
alex
night time fire
I’ve been really slacking on the blog front. Shame!
I will never be a famous, awesome blogger if I can’t managed to squeeze out more than post a month, now will I?
But, there was something that I had to write and until I did that, I felt like I couldn’t write about any of the other trivial silly things that I might have, like giving myself a weekly speed test for running a mile or going on vacation to Kaua’i.
The thing is that my Aunt Mary, my mom’s twin sister, died on May 10.
She was sick for a long time. Cancer of the appendix that kept turning into cancer of this and cancer of that. They took little bits out of her one at a time until I’m not really sure what was left in there.
It went on for so long that I got used it. And because I was on the other side of the country, I didn’t have to confront the reality; I only had to settle myself with the idea.
When she finally did die, I thought it was fine. A relief more than anything else. The horribleness of her story was finally over. My mother did not have to make the trip out to see her every weekend to weep at her bedside. It was good to be finished.
David and I went to the funeral, flying out on a red eye on Tuesday night, arriving in JFK on Wednesday morning. We went to pick up Nana from her nursing home and then to the service. I expected it to be hard, but fine. Tolerable. It was so much worse than I expected. It’s normal to not see Aunt Mary most of the time. She’s never come to visit me here in California. But it is definitely not normal to see those cousins, to see her children and her step children, to be there in her scene and to not see her. She seemed so horribly missing.
And then later, taking Nana back to the nursing home… she had appeared so stoic through it all, but then she started to cry. She said “She was my little baby. I held her in my arms. How can I never see her again?” It was possibly the most despairing moment of my life.
Aunt Mary was like a fairy godmother to me. When I was a little girl, she didn’t have children of her own, me and my brothers were the only nieces and nephews, and she absolutely doted on me. The boys were wild and unruly, but I was *the little girl.* I was the outsider in my dirty, tumultuous, heathen family. I wanted cabbage patch dolls and make-up and the clothes from Benetton that all the other popular girls wore and, much to my mother’s disgust, Aunt Mary would always oblige.
When I was 11, I flew from North Carolina to New York all by myself to visit her. She bought me a red dress and took me to see a Broadway musical and to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe. It was amazing and fantastic and wonderful. A fantasy.
But as much as she loved me, she always wanted to have her own children, of course. I was too young to know all the details, but she had quite a few miscarriages before she and her husband (who she’d only just married when I was 8 or 9 or so) decided to adopt. So in her early 40’s, she adopted two children – newborns each – about two years apart. And just like she had spoiled me on birthdays and on various special occasions, she spoiled these two children. But every day. Until they grew up into something awful. Maybe because of the over abundance of cloying love, maybe because of their genetic nature, maybe because of a thousand things combined.
After her marriage to a man ten years older and becoming a mother of two, I was no longer her favorite. But I was getting older and didn’t really need an aunt for whom I was the favorite any more. Later, I moved to California and I saw her very rarely. Probably I didn’t even see her every time I went home to visit my family, which is usually only once or twice a year.
So by the time she got sick, I was already removed – emotionally and physically. More than other feelings, I hurt for my mother going through the loss of a sister, a twin. And it scared me that I could now be at an age in which my parent’s people, or my parents, could die. And I thought that it would be fine. It will be sad, but ok. It is ok, but now that it’s over I see that there is still the grief of a little girl who lost a very special aunt.
Aunt Mary and me, 1 year old. 1978.
Filed under Momentousness
Last weekend, the meat booth at our farmer’s market was selling corned beef. They had a sign to tell us that it was Special! and everything.
The David thinks this is a good thing and stops to get one, but they’ve run out.
The next day, in the ferry building, we stop at the butcher there, but they’ve only got humongo slabs of corned beef and don’t want to cut them into smaller slabs. So we skip it.
Later, we’re planning out our meals for the week and we’ve got everything we need for corned beef and cabbage on our shopping list. At Whole Foods, we successfully acquire a 2 pound non-humongo slab of corned beef. Hurrah!
So, later this week, I’m discussing with David how we’ll have to plan to have our corned beef on Thursday. It needs 3 hours to cook and that takes a little foresight to incorporate into your week night, because the damn dinner-cooking fairies I ordered off of Amazon got waylaid in customs or something.
The conversation goes something like this:
Me: “I think I’ll try to put the corned beef on to cook on Wednesday night and then start on regular dinner.”
David: “Ok. How come on Wednesday night?”
Me: “Because then we can have it ready for Thursday.”
David: “What’s on Thursday?”
Me: “Saint Patrick’s Day?”
David: “So?”
Me: “Saint Patrick’s Day and corned beef and cabbage.”
David: “Is that a thing?”
Me: “Uh. Yeah.” Obviously.
David. “It’s an Irish thing?”
Me: “Yes! That’s what you eat on Saint Patrick’s Day!”
I realize that David wasn’t wanting to get corned beef for any special occasion, but just because we’ve been seeing signs for it and mention of it everywhere. And it’s becoming clear to me that David, as a British person, is woefully uneducated on what it means to be Irish*, a topic we Americans pursue with passion.
*Apparently, corned beef and cabbage is not Irish at all. The Irish may have prepared something sort of similar combining back bacon (not streaky like the kind Americans eat) with cabbage. But the “traditional” corned beef and cabbage dish is not Irish.
Filed under Foodery, The David, these are the days of my lives
We’ve been having this unseasonal warm and golden sunny weather lately here in the Bay Area.
It stopped on Sunday and got back to February as usual: a steady stream of drizzly, gray, cool days.
But the blissful amazingness was still going strong on Saturday, which was a special treat for Jessica, who gets to have her birthday this time of year each and every year.
While I get all weird and jiggity about my own birthday, I’m definitely in favor of the institution in general. And I was definitely in favor of a birthday flavored picnic near Stinson Beach on a warm Saturday.
It was a great day for pictures. I took many.
It was also a good day for cheeses and rosé and tree swings and for the birthdays of best friends.
Filed under Special happy things
margaret edith 