Catchin' Up

Good mornin'...and it is morning.

Yesterday was St George's Day and all us dragon hunters were very busy. I trust that a significant number of dragons were slain in the name of our Lord yesterday.  I hunted but did not find nor slay one.  However, it is every day's business after all, so shall continueon.

I did not attend the ceremony at St Paul's.  Have been going for many years and have missed many. The ones in the eighties (and before) were very impressive services.  A huge contingency of British folk from as far away as the consulate at Los Angeles came en masse and attended, dressed to the gills.  I was impressed every time.

Most impressive of course were the pipers in their kilts and full costume.  I remember how let down I felt that they did not pipe away through the full service but only led in and out at the processional and recessional sequences.  They were and are still wonderful--a strange and moving music.

There are  the split baby croissants from which I made my ham, butter, honey-mustard, and lettuce sandwiches.  I was frustrated by n ot having a kitchen and was sorry I'd said I'd do my share. (What was I thinking of?) Those sandwiches were made outside and I was so frustrated by the process that I only made half my (self imposed) quota or less.  After I finished we dashed up to St P's and I ran up  and left them in the kitchen and adios.

Speaking of kitchens, our kitchen proceeds apace. There is Carlos, working this morning. He's proceeded to putting on the handles of the cabinets.
Kitchen looks kind of ordinary, doesn't it? It will look a little less so when it's finished, I hope.

I conclude with the best part of the transformation so far: the location of my coffee station on the back patio. It makes my early mornings so nice.YAZZYBEL

Three Things on my Shopping List

Good afternoon!

What, only three things? Yes, on my permanent shopping list there are three things that I will buy whenever and wherever I find them. However, I almost never do any more.

The first thing is a 1970 or earlier Mirado No. ONE yellow pencil.  What a wonderful pencil that was.  It wrote black. Very black. And it was wonderfully crafted in that, though soft and black, it held up for sharpening very well.

Did you know that Mirado pencils started out as Mikado pencils? When World War Two concentrated the national anxiety and hate upon the Japanese, the name of the pencil was changed to Mirado.  I had always loved the Japanese Mikado (don't know why...reincarnation, I guess) and I remember that at age ten or eleven it was hard to adjust to a new image for my favorite pencil.

It blows my mind to think that, as late as the eighties, I could stroll into the Savon Drugs on Point Loma and buy one, ten, or a whole box of Mirado No. 1 pencils.  Made in the USA, of course. And oh, how I wish I had bought ten boxes. I miss them. No, they aren't the same any more.

The next thing on my shopping list is the homely dime store scrapbook. These unappreciated items were large bulky and rather unattractive things with fillers of coarse brown or black paper, and they were meant for pasting things into. Where did they go?  When "scrapbooking" became a national art instead of the refuge of the lonely widder or spinster or bed-bound child with a pair of scissors, the scrapbook became an expensive cumbersome holder for artistic activity instead of the receptor of items jaggedly cut out from a newpaper or magazine and glued in with school-room paste, a procedure which could take hours of pleasurable time.  I want some tacky old fashioned scrapbooks for all the junk I am uprooting from boxes and bags in my old age. If my grandchildren don't want these scrapbooks, I can imagine that there are plenty of other people in the world who'd enjoy looking at the detritus of my life.

And the third item is the one you should all be looking for yourselves, folks--it's the utensils for kitchen use manufactured in the USA from 1900, say, to 1990, say.  If it is steel, was made here, has USA on it, it is going to be worth a lot of money in twenty years in the future. Spatulas, kitchen forks, runcible spoons, knives...sifters, strainers, pots, pans, they'll all be here in a thousand years if we take care of them, and they will be worth a lot of money by folks who don't fancy using klutzy stuff from other lands who are posing as steelmakers.

Those are three things I am always looking for. You used to find the kitchen stuff (American made) routinely in thrift shops...try to find them there now. Pencils? Forget it--except at garage sales where there are still homes where the old folks hoarded American made pencils for years...buy the lot, buy the lot.  And scrapbooks? I am told that they are still around in stores, that I just haven't found the store. In the long long ago people cut pages out of brown kraft paper and sewed them together to make their scrapbooks.  Get out your garage sale scissors and get to work, as long as we can still buy craft paper. YAZZYBEL

Chaos Reigns

Good morning. The MOW has not come yet so it's still morning.

I am putting on a picture or two of the kitchen. There were a couple of later photos yesterday but they wont download for some reason. So I'll choose from what's available.

Those are pictures of our existence right now--couldn't call it a life--but they're not complete because you can't hear the sound effects. We only thought we were deaf before.

Just to show you that there is order somewhere in our universe, I'll show you a beautiful salvia that pulled itself together, tossed off its dead appearance, and came forth with beauty and joy.

I love its wonderful color, the size of the blossoms (huge), and the furriness of the leaves and stems which gives the plant a shimmering silvery effect.  LOVELY!!

Hasta manana--YAZZYBEL

Two Years Ago Today

It's now two years since BP messed up the Gulf Coast. 

Although the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama received the most of the publicity, the Texas Gulf Coast is huge and long, and the sea life there is bound to have been affected as well.

I well remember the wonderful seafood meals I've had from that Gulf:  small, intensely flavorful oysters, huge pink shrimp, wonderful red snapper, pompano--crabs!! too many to recount.

Thank goodness, my mama was not timid. She took on each creature  and turned out delicious meals. But, remember, the seafood itself was wonderful. Raised in warm, living brine--it was healthy and pure when we got it. Now, who knows what's in it and what's happening to it? It makes me sad.

I cried when I heard of the BP spill. We should all remember it every year. Don't believe all they tell you on those TV commercials.  It's criminal, and we are all guilty because it's our society and our economy and we choose to be irresponsible all the same. YAZZYBEL

Kitchen Tear Out Begins

Yes. They are here tearing out the old kitchen.

I am zonked from all the noise. I hope they will be done by three or four and go away for a while.

Knowing kitchen do-overs, they will go away for quite a while.  No worry about a rest from the activities for us.  We will doubtless be wondering again, in a few days, whatever happened to the project.

That seems to be the name of the game. YAZZYBEL, re-modeler.

Thinking of Guadalupe

Good evenin'. Late for breakfast.

Today I have been thinking of Guadalupe. I started thinking of her because I have been thinking of doing another painting with the Virgin of Guadalupe in it, but haven't decided what to do.

The Guadalupe I have been thinking of is the Guadalupe who worked for me when I lived up in Mission Hills.  Her brother worked for the old gentleman across the street, and one day the brother, who was kind of a dangerous seeming character and the kind of person you wonder if he was the right person to be caring for an older man--but he was accepted as a neighborhood person. Anyway, he came over and asked me if I'd like to have his sister come over and clean for me every other Saturday, and I thought it over and said I'd give her a try.  Dangerous seeming young Mexican men can have, often do have, very decorous and good sisters, so I felt that I 'd be fine. What's her name? I asked.  Maria, he said.

When she came, she seemed  a very nice, very quiet and rather intimidated person, willing to take orders and also willing to work with simple and inadequate equipment like a pan and a broom, and a string mop, and such. I did not have any fancy stuff.  So she swept away by the hour in that airy house with its bare floors.  I was glad to have her. She was really tickled with my floor polishing machine, and pushed it around happily  till all the floors gleamed.

She was never chatty, very quiet, in fact. But one say, she looked at me with her arresting cock-eyed gaze and said, "You know, I'm called Guadalupe."
I was embarrassed at having called her by the name her brother had told me, and said so. "He told me that your name was Maria, that's all he told me," I said.  She fixed me with her funny look and, smiling, suddenly on very secure ground, said, "Oh, that's all right. After all, we are all Marias, aren't we?"

Her funny little off-kilter gaze was one she employed, I found, on other occasions, when she was telling me the truth.  Such as why her brother could not take a chance on being drafted by the United States: (Gaze) Porque se inyecta.(Gaze. Shamefaced but honest.)  He took drugs...And why she had been under the weather for a few weeks...it was because she had worms, intestinal parasites.
That made me a little nervous but it was soon cleared up, she informed me.

The extent of her poverty at home was slowly made clear to me as we grew closer and would chat together at intervals. Her husband made his living by buying and selling tires, used tires.  It sounded to me as if he worked on a level barely above the criminal life.  Her house was a shack. There was no running water. While she worked for me, they put a pipe into the kitchen so she could have a sink--a great step upward.  And when I offered her some leftover vinyl tiles from a flooring project we had had, she took them and told me that she' d used them to cover a rough board counter that they had put the sink into--and she was so happy to have them.

I have often wondered about what she thought of me and my life.  When I sold my house, she was so impressed.  Looking at me cock-eyed,  sharing what she imagined to be my gratification to  make a big sale,  "Such a big house: I bet you sold it for--ten thousand dollars!!" she said in awe.  I told her a lie, I just said that the house really belonged to my family and I just sold it for them. This is a handy line for any and all Latinos and I wish I'd thought of it also when some other people were a bit too close to me for comfort.

She was a wonderful help to me. I wish I knew where she was now, and what she looks like and if she is in good health after these twenty five years have gone by.  But what I will always remember and love her for is that she gave me that wonderful idea,-- that, after all, we are all Marias, no? YAZZYBEL

Le Dr. Knock, ou la Triomphe de la Medicine

Good morning.

If you did not take a French course at a certain level, at a certain school, at a certain date, you probably have not read the above play.

It is a play by Romain Rolland, written probably pre-World War Two.  Its title is, "Dr. Knock, or, The Triumph of Medicine."

Dr. Knock is a young smart-ass who graduates from medical school and then sets about to buy a practice. That's what you did to set up on your own; you bought an already established practice from an old doctor who was about to retire. Then you walked in on your new life with a set of patients already set up for you.

Dr. Knock walks into his new post in time to have a farewell conference with the good old retiring doctor. "I'm afraid you have chosen a very quiet place to start your practice," says the old doctor."Up here in the mountains, we have such healthy air and water that nobody is ever ill. You'll never make much money or have much business if you stay here."  And he departs.

Dr. Knock knows better.  His first day in town he puts up big signs:   FREE CLINIC. FREE HEALTH TESTING.   And the people, tempted by the prospect of getting something for nothing, all show up.

Surprise!  Turns out that they only thought that there was nothing wrong with them. Le Dr. Knock soon has everyone diagnosed with something.  They are all sick, and didn't know it!!

The play progresses until, at the end, Dr. Knock is up in the middle of the night looking out at his hillside cottages all with a light on. "Look," he says to his servant,"See those cottages with  a light on? That means that in each one, there is an ill person with someone up to care for him. I did that! I made all this happen!"

Dr Knock goes mad, of course. But medicine has triumphed!  Is there anything familiar about this scenario?  Doesn't it seem kind of like the last time you went to the doctor?

When I think of all the new diseases I just cringe. It means some pharmaceutical company has made a new drug.  "Gosh, why is there so much autism now?" someone wondered the other day.  Follow the pharmaceuticals, I answer.  What about Type 2 Diabetes?  There used to be none. You either had diabetes or you didn't.  Follow the pharmaceuticals, stupid. 

We have to eat as well as we can, be careful not to fall down, get some exercise and then get some rest, and say our prayers.  And think about Dr Knock the next time we get handed a new prescription. YAZZYBEL

Trivial Pursuits

Good noon.
This has been a busy week. Nothing much has been done, as far as my personal check-off list is concerned.

Outside, things are happening. The fencing man, Richard, is there with his faithful crew, trying to finish up the back yard fences before the rains hit.
They have finished the long front to back part that's between our lot and the clinica.  That's in cedar. We decided against replacing it with redwood, and the fence guy has hauled off tons of valuable redwood boards, weathered but OK, to his advantage.

Then at the back lot line, the cedar fence turns the corner and continues about twenty feet.  At that point, it becomes chain link which will serve to delineate a dropping off place up here , down to the lower forty.  We are keeping Theo's staircase, but the gate up top will be chain link. And only three or four feet tall.  Our view will be augmented, and the neighbors' view of our yard will be greatly augmented since it will be opened up for the first time ever, ever since the redwood fence was put up twenty five years ago at least.

Will I like it? Will it be what I'd want? No.  I have learned to compromise.  It is strange that we are in a recession but everything is 'way more costly than it used to be anyway.  If a fence cost 500 dollars eight years ago, you can bet on its cost being 900 now.  And there's the cost of the labor. It, too , has gone way up. If there are any bargain workers out there I have no idea how to find them. C'est la vie.

That reminds me of a naughty joke. A Mexican and a Frenchman are standing on a street corner when a pretty girl walks by.  A breeze blows her skirts up around her waist, and the Frenchman turns to the Mexican and says, "Ah, c'est la vie."  The Mexican turns to the Frenchman and says, "Yo se la vi, tambien."  Every man in Brownsville Texas thinks he made that joke up himself.  YAZZYBEL

Poor Henry James

Good morning.

I think I've told you that, like Bertie Wooster's uncle, I get my best ideas when my navel is immersed in warm bath water. Often, the idea hits as the two elements come in contact. Bingo.

That is what I felt yesterday, as I began my bath.  Henry James had Asperger's Syndrome.

Is that revelation important to the world? I don't know. It might be, to a scholar who's studying James'life.  It might be, to an interested observer like myself, in the context of making relationships, to a person who has always found it not easy to make relationships.

Or to a person who does not care deeply about making relationships. Or does not, more specifically, need to make relationships in order to have a meaningful life.  That is kind of where I am.
I've always wondered how I could have in my life moved so happily (relatively) from one place and set of friends to another place and set of friends.  It's been difficult for me twice in my life, the rest not...and I have moved about a lot.

I do make relationships and I do make friends. Sometimes through circumstances these relationships are lost.  Basically, I remember them well but I move on. I enjoy the new relationships very much. What is the matter with me? I have begun to think.

The problem began to surface lately with thinking about the relationship-capacity of a friend (always easier to see from the outside.)  I was prowling the web and came upon a page, "Take the Asperger's Test."  Actually I was looking for Autism.  I took the test and came out at 28. If you score 34, you definitely have got it.  Normal women's score is 14 or 15, whichever.  Bingo again. 

Asperger's is high-functioning autism.  A good syndrome for musicians (soloists)...writers...and others who do not have to be part of a team.  A bad syndrome for us ordinary folk who would like the warming support of lots of others around us doing what we're doing sometimes.  But--we can deal with it.  We have to.

It explains why as I child was called Greta Garbo by my mother.  " I want to be alone," was my motto often during a day when the family played games and I wanted to read.  But my favorite reading was often done in a big chair nearby as they wrangled over the card table. I wasn't completely hopeless.

It explains why my favorite things have always been writing, painting, piano-ing, solo singing.  It explains why I am so ill suited to be in choirs and choruses. It explains why I am not an orchestra member.  It explains why I don't like art classes (they are the most sociable of group artistic studies, it seems to me; admirable).  It explains why I hate committees and don't function very well at parties. 

It explains why I am adverse to bridge although I am more amenable and happy at card-playing in general than I used to be.  Even at cards,  I used to win at games where I was on my own, no partner.  Now, I am not disturbed by a partner though I'll take no nonsense.

What does all this have to do with Henry James? Do you remember my post of several weeks ago where I was writing about the novel, The Master, by Toim Cobin?  That novel has stayed with me, in my mind and heart, so much in the weeks since I finished it. What a nice, good person he was.  What a tragedy that he was really totally unable to have a relationship with almost anybody...he tried.  He was the prisoner of his nutty family, and his nutty upbringing.  But everyone has those. He was really the prisoner of his genetic makeup, and for that nobody can ever be to blame.  He was not really sad about it.  He saw the world with new eyes and kept writing.  No doubt he thought about (and perhaps wrote about) his disability in a more lucid and cogent way than I could ever hope to approach.  So, if he wasn't lugubrious about it, should we be? No. Henry James wasn't poor at all. Nor am I. YAZZYBEL

Easter 2012 Pictures

Yes, I realize I typed in the wrong year. It's 2012. There am I in my church suit, and there are some flowers, etc., and Theo with humungous rose, if I can get them all on. YAZZYBEL

Easter 2012

Happy Easter!! 

And Happy Paysach too!

Church was especially nice today because they baptized two babies, too little boys of the year old category....very cute and sweet. One was a little younger, the other a little older.  People (women) around me said, "Awwww...," softly as the babies were borne by in the arms of their fathers or another male relative.  I liked seeing them kiss their babies on the top of the head.  An irresistible impulse, that, isn't it, if you're holding one?

The flowers were all white,  and my favorite thing is all white flowers.  But this year I felt they were a little lacking. St Paul's has a number of great huge copper window boxes that go underneath the stained glass windows, and some years they have just been burgeoning with spring blooms of all kinds and all colors.  This year, things were a little sparse. There were Easter lilies only, and not a huge lot of them.   Perhaps it's the recession....

There were a number of strangers today, probably because it's Easter and because of the baptisms. Two elderly 'girls' came in and sat next to me and proceeded to chitter and chat and giggle at every moment of interval.  I even thought we were having that Easter earthquake that I gloomily anticipate every Easter, as the pew shivered and shook under their spasms of merriment.

I almost assumed a proper Episcopal attitude to ask them to tone it down, but held back.  When we passed the Peace, I chatted too. Turns out they were having a joyful reunion, friends from the seventh grade, and were so happy to be together. I am glad I didn't say anything snippish.  Episcopal women are often held to be snippish, and sometimes are.  Their happiness and rowdy joy were really more appropriate to the day than any comment I could have made on deportment.

I wore a skirt today. A skirt suit, of pretty grey material.  As I sat down I had a Madeleine Allbright moment that made me remember why I think pants are really more graceful than skirts unless the skirts are long and full.  Madeleine used to make me suffer in the nineties, there, where I saw her on the news amongst presidents and sheiks, her middle-elderly plump legs in their tight skirt barely making it for decency's sake.  Short tight skirts are not made for legs and figures like mine nor Madeleine's.  Happy Easter, everybody. YAZZYBEL

Good Friday

Good afternoon.

It's Good Friday so I went to church.  Sat with three other hens.  Made a lunch date with one of them.

The service was a wonderful one. It's odd that though I don't really 'like' Good Friday, I am always glad I went. The music was beautiful and the service, though it lasted for almost an hour and a half, simply sailed by in the lovely sounds of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ.

There was a choir of four and an orchestra of four. The singers were soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. The instruments were 2 violins, a viola, and a cello. Altogether they were a beautifully blended mixture of rich sound. All singers are excellent.

There were prayers, with enough standing and sitting to satisfy even my range-of-motion demands. And the Bishop gave four (or was it three) fine meditations at intervals.

The Seven Last Words of Christ by Haydn, though fraught with the stark tragedy of the worst day of the Christian year, is a beautiful piece of music to listen to.  It is never lugubrious.  And before you smile, believe me. It's possible for the finest intentions to become lugubrious.  I have received many communications on the Internet regarding the nature of dogs, that were quite lugubrious.  And if it is awful to be lugubrious about dogs and such, it is worse to be so about our Creator.  And I get those too.  I just don't send them on to other misfortunate readers with the threat of grave bodily harm if people don't send them on.

The Seven Last Words are quite brief, even as augmented by the librettist. I wonder if it was Haydn.  The music--flows.  That is the only word for it.  It is just beautiful and the flow is not stopped by the glottals (if that is the word I want) of German.  That is all imagined anyway, the glottal part.  German is a beautiful language, and this piece couldn't have been written in a lovelier.

That is all I wanted to say.  It isn't a requiem, so it is okay that I went to it. Yes. YAZZYBEL

Just Dont Like Requiems

Good afternoon.

I am watching the end of Amadeus, where, dying, Mozart is pushing out of himself with his dying gasps his wonderful Requiem--in C, is it? Don't remember. It's magnificent.

But I dont like requiems.  I just refuse to go to any, any more.  Perhaps it's because  to me they are a requiem for a civilization that has gone to the dogs, through stupidity and cupidity and greed at all levels.  I know; that is very depressed and negative thinking. So I don't think that way too much; I don't let myself think it.  I think of other things like animals, farms, music, all arts, books and reading, of food and cookery, some little bit of religion . I think of the goodness of Mexicans I have known,  and that of some Americans (fewer).  When I think of religion I think of Christianity as personified by the Episcopal Church, and how,even if it is all just a made up myth, what a fantastic myth it is, what a fantastic creation.  Perhaps we made it up for our own consolation, or our own vindication, or our own--castigation.  Nowadays, it doesn't work for that last phrase because the word from Above as I last heard it was that we were all already forgiven before we were born. We can't even commit our own sins nor suffer for them.  Wait a minute--I am going too far.  Better stop and go back to animals.

The other night I saw a beautiful special on whales. They are so fascinating.  It is a bizarre thing to feel sympathy for a brother or sister whose eye, alone, is bigger than one's whole person.  But there they were capering around in the ocean as free as birds, living life on such a large scale that it's hard to imagine that life. I wrote a poem about whales a long time ago, and here it is.

          Sometimes at night I cannot sleep
          Until I think of whales..
          Out in the wet and dark and cold,
          Rolling with the Grace of God
          In vast and frigid cradles of the waves.

          If there is a moon they're watching it.
         Their blood is warm,
         And oh, so long ago they left safe earth,
         Dryness, and the comfort of warm snuggling,
         The usefulness of arms and hands
         To touch and work for one--
         Their little ones bob at their sides,
          Never to be grasped. 
        
          And the vast awe I feel at their bravery
          In that tremendous dark water
          Sends me off to sleep.

That is a very corny and incompleted poem but  I have not seen fit to change it since 10-7-79 which is the date I wrote it on.  Of course it didn't say one tenth of what I wanted to express, but it's all true anyway.  YAZZYBEL

Lazy Coral Tree

 

Good afternoon.

That is the one blossom squeezed out by my large, professionally pruned coral tree.  For years, it has managed to put out one flower about the time the leaves came out.

Coral trees are bare in winter, and before their leaves come out in spring. they are supposed to be covered with a glorious garment of red flowers.  My tree would not do that.  For years, it was kept in a pot and dutifully filled its job as a small tree in a pot in my front yard in Misson Hills. Then it did the same down here until finally I decided to put it out in the front yard, upon which it obligingly grew huge.  I assumed that when it had done that it would cheerfully bloom for me.  The most it ever put out was one flower lost in the early leaves in early spring.  I thought this year, being pruned and rejuvenated, it would bloom like everything. It didn't.

Next year, starting in January, I'll fertilize every week without fail. Surely then it will show us everything it's got. I hope. YAZZYBEL

Flashback--or Flash Forward?

Good morning!

I have a recurring vision of Brownsville, Texas, my home town.

I don't know when I saw it.  Possibly I saw it many times.  It's a simple picture, in the poorer part of town.  A simple lot in the town, with a humble unpainted residence on it. Lots of greenery, trees, bushes, grasses.  Yellow sunshine, lots of yellow morning sunshine, and overhead a huge sky of perfect cerulean blue with white cumulus clouds. But the focus is on that spot on the ground, that little house, those plants, that greenery, that yellow sunshine.

The sunshine was truly yellow in those days, there in Brownsville, Texas, in the morning.  The first thing that struck me upon waking up in Berkeley, California, was that the colors of California were very different.  There is a lot of orange, and the shadows are blue and purple.  The shadows of Texas--well I don't know what color they were then.  The color of welcome shade.  True yellow would have true violet as its shade but it seemed to me to tend to brown.

I don't know how or where that vision was fixed upon my brain, that particular moment in time and space  lodged in my consciousness.  But it's just there, ready to pop up out of its own volition once in a while, when I think of "home."  How pretty and how nice.

There are other visions, like down around the area back of the Missouri Pacific station near the river and back of the El Jardin Hotel at night.  It's dark (there were not as many electric lights in those days) and it is a little misty, and there is a mystery there that I have envisioned a thousand times as it came to me.  That's beautiful too, if a little scary. I probably saw that sight out of the window of a car as I was riding around after sunset, propelled by my unthinking parents into a vision I'd not forget.  I wonder why I kept these things, or why I was given them in the first place. Haunting scenes that are just there within me, that come back to visit me now and then.  Does everybody have them?  I think they must.  YAZZYBEL

Monday, Monday

Good morning.

Yes, Gentle Readers, that was me yesterday, in my clothes of many colors and patterns. You can't see the shoes but I assure you they were as described. I didn't hear any complaints.

And there below is the hero of the driver's license struggles, looking chipper. He looks good enough to have gone to Early Church with me, but of course he would not go. He rushed right up to get his picture taken when I got home, though.

Well, c'est  la vie.
And that's the way it is, this morning of Monday, April 2, 2012. YAZZYBEL

Happy Birthday, Frank!

I know I said I wouldn't do it this year, but--it is April Fool's after all. So, Happy Birthday, Frank Parker--guess it's your 83rd.  Wonder how I knew that? So, April Fool's,--and forgive me.

Yesterday I talked on the phone with Gwen L. there in Denver, CO, also a long ago Brownsville-ite whom I hadn't spoken with in ages. We had a wonderful laughing chat of remembrance.  One of the best things about being old is that your friends are in the same boat and you find that you STILL have a lot in common, just like the olden days.

This morning going to church I decided to emulate the fashion magazines and see how many different patterns I could put together successfully.  I wore tan pants, brown tee, desert-sunset horizonally striped vest, Ralph Lauren plaid blazer of dark olive, dark blue, and wine, and to top it all off a silk scarf with black and white leopardish design and those gold medallions etc. that were fashionable not so very long ago. Piled it on together. Think I 'll take a photo to see how it all came out. Oh , and on my dainty feet were gray socks and Mexican looking sandals like huaraches of the lowest order.

Today is Palm Sunday and church was different but the same as always, just like always. We all had a piece of palm leaf to hold up at the appropriate moment. Thank goodness I was aware enough to leave mine at the door when I left rather than bring it home and see it wither away for fear of throwing out.  They supposedly collect these leaves and burn them for next years Ash Wednesday ashes, so perhaps I'll see my leaf again.  Transformed.

On the way home I bought a raisin pinwheel doughnut from Sunny Doughnuts, the best doughnut shop around. And I stopped at the Goodwill to look for the random VHS tape, getting harder and harder to find. There at the Goodwill were racks and racks of new clothes. NEW clothes, I tell you--from Coldwater Creek, Chicos, and upscale dept. stores..I got a suit and a dress and nobody will know. Since nobody reads my blog.:( except for a faithful few whom I appreciate for sharing my life.) YAZZYBEL