Baked or fried?

First Person: L.A. Bakes in Record 113 Degrees

It's way too hot to have this laptop anywhere near me today. Sweat is pouring from every resident of Los Angeles today. After school we did minimal homework and jumped in the pool. Dinner consisted of a salad because my kitchen was 100 degrees at dinnertime. It's awful. My Facebook status says "It's so hot, I just saw squirrels fanning their nuts." That made me laugh.

It was still hot when D got home and we both decided the best place for us was in the pool. Night swimming is wonderful under a star filled sky. I mean I couldn't see the stars but I knew they were there.

Stay cool my friends.

Are you ready for some football?

I know, I know, I've written about football a million times already. I just can't help it. I'm just so happy that D and I have both passed on that gene to K who got ready this morning by herself. She emerged from her room in full Lion attire and proclaimed quite loudly her desire for them to beat the Vikings. She even repeated a wish for their quarterback but I'm not going to repeat it since it wasn't too nice. I love her.

D still had some work to do but was able to multitask effortlessly. His Patriot's game was on the same time as the Lions but they managed to switch back easily. Poor K, she was so excited for her team to beat Brett Favre and make mommy happy. Once again she sat in my lap and the repeated phrase I have uttered for years "my team stinks." Yeah, I know that feeling, still she hung in until the bitter (and ugly end). She bounced back pretty quickly and begged us to call and invite her friend, who lives up the street, over for a swim (did I mention that it was the hottest day of the year?). I have to remember to rally like that after a loss, usually I'm in a foul mood for days.

We were in luck, her friend was available and was just as bored. She and her dad walked over here and the girls disappeared in the abyss that is currently K's room. We thought for sure they would emerge in swimsuits but they were happy just playing. Finally they decided it was time to swim, I guess they both realized that it's no fun playing in the heat. They swam for a while until one of our friends brought her puppy over. Then they decided swim time was over and took the dog inside our house to play. D and I have no problem with this. First, he is so freaking adorable you just can't help but to gush over him, second, this dog is cool, really cool, he has an energy that is infectious and loves to play just as much as he loves to cuddle. The girls disappeared into K's abyss, I hoped for the poor puppy. We heard the cutest laughter coming from her room, she had to close the door though, he likes to run around a lot. After about 10 minutes I went to check on them, the poor puppy was wearing a pink boa and was getting ready to sport a tiara. I didn't think this was good idea, this is a tiny puppy and I didn't want them to find clever second grade ways to keep that crown on the dog's head.

After a while we had to say goodbye, K's friend and her dad needed to get home and do their Sunday thing. We kept the dog for a while though, the three of us have completely fallen in love with him and wanted more time to watch him run around. I just wanted to hold him, he has that sweet puppy smell I never got to experience as a child. Allergies kept me from having a dog growing up, or at least that's what my parents told me. K wants nothing more than to have a little dog like the one she played with today, honestly as much as I love dogs I knew it was something we were not to deal with, besides we could never agree on what kind of dog we would get. K likes all dogs and has a list of the different kinds she wants, D would like to get a Basenji (um, OK) and I would like a big dog like a Lab, Shepherd or Retriever. I never wanted a small dog but this little puppy has changed all that. He's part Chihuahua and part something else, possibly Labrador, although I can't figure out how that would work.

After we returned the dog we were all sad, I had taken some pictures of D and K with our new friend and we marveled at how cute they all looked together. We now have to rethink the whole dog thing. Although if we can clone this dog there would be no thinking necessary.

That brought us right to the Jet game which was about to start. Suddenly K had no interest in football as her team had already played. This was a big game for me, I mean for the Jets, it was a divisional game against our mortal enemy the Dollfans (boo). It was one of those games, the kind that keeps me on my feet yelling at the television. Suddenly K was interested in watching, me, not the game. Apparently I am more amusing. After what seemed like an eternity, my, I mean the Jet, defense finally showed up and we threw the evil fish back into the ocean. Sorry, we beat the Dollfans 31 to 23. I use the majestic plural or "royal we" when discussing my team. A lifetime of fanhood has made me feel that this is acceptable.

So there was my Sunday, full of football, happy little girls, puppies, chaos and heart wrenching drama. Not to mention family, friends and that wonderful new puppy smell.

Yeah, I'm ready for some football and whatever else you got.

Song for a Saturday

Bruce Springsteen - Drive All Night (Unreleased Studio Outtake)

So today was one of those driving days. It didn't start out that way, it was supposed to be easy. I was supposed to take K to karate while D met with his corporate attorney and then he would take her to piano. Then we found out that we had been invited to the birthday party of our good friend's son but thanks to the USPS we never got the invite. That would move up the piano lesson and we would all have to go. No biggie, we could make it work. Then I received an email for a casting that K had. OK, it was possible to do all of this: Karate first, then off to the party in Culver City, after that a hopefully quick drive to Manhattan Beach and back again to the Westside. It could totally be done with ease especially with another driver to sit in the car while we ran into the casting.

Then I got the call that D had to work. Crap. Looks like I was driving the local again. It all worked out though. In the morning K decided to skip karate since she went four times during the week, that gave me a little break and we went right to the party, which was fun. Then it was off to the casting and for some reason there was hardly any traffic making the ride a joy. Until we got there. My Yahoo map had cut off key instructions so I was left to trust my GPS which took me to the ocean. I immediately called D and he navigated us to the correct location. I was relieved until I saw the lack of parking. The sudden arrival of summer made Manhattan Beach a very popular destination. Parking was impossible to find and then suddenly we spied a spot a block away. Score! Then I noticed that it was a 24 minute parking spot. We rushed down the street and were in and out in 20 minutes, that included the few minutes K spent with a friend. Then it was back to the car and off to piano.

Somehow I managed to make all points with very little drama. By the time we got home I was exhausted and could barely move. K was still jumpy from the junk she had at the party. I tried to write but couldn't keep my eyes opened and fell asleep with my laptop on my stomach.

The whole day I had this old Bruce Springsteen song in my head. I'm not a Bruce fan at all but for some reason this song was in my thoughts.

I sure took a long time to explain why this is the song for today.

Enjoy.

A world of difference

Sometimes when I think back at the decisions I've made I get a headache. What turns that headache into a migraine is when I make the same stupid decision over and over. It's like that expression "Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me" although I do love the George W. Bush version: "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." Sorry, I had to put that in for a laugh, I can't help but think of it every time I say the actual phrase.

It's true though, every time I repeat a mistake it's my fault and my fault alone. I'm not here today to write about how stupid I am, or to rehash a bunch of idiot moves that fail to show me in my best light. This morning I had a conversation with D about this evening's plans. First it was the back to school picnic, an event that is dreaded by the adults in our house, sure it's fun for K, she gets to run around and play with her friends while we are forced to sit there amongst parents who pretend to like each other. At least we don't bring food anymore. I made a rookie mistake the first picnic and filled a basket with goodies that sat uneaten while K went off with her friends and D and sat around feeling like outcasts. Last year I brought no food and the plan was to let her play for a while and then go out to dinner. This year we're going to skip it entirely (although K is not yet aware of this plan). I told D that I think I had made plans with a friend (and fellow stagemom) to meet for a while in the evening. Here's the thing: I don't like to go out at night, actually that's not completely true, I do not like to go out at night without my family. When I was vague about my plans D knew it was just me deciding how I was going to get out of it. Then he got on me for that. He told me that we'd work something out so he can stay with K and that I was going. End of story. When I started my protest he actually said "Nope, you're going, I demand that you out and have fun with your friends."

I love my husband.

This conversation took me back to my previous life with Starter Husband. His job in television ad sales was extremely social, in fact about ninety percent of it was entertaining. There were lunches, dinners, no-host parties, concerts, baseball games, weekend trips, in fact if it involved people, they did it. They also did it without partners, at least Starter Husband did it that way. I was invited to go along only sometimes. Most of the time I was home and left to my own devices, which would have been fine except my devices were only allowed to be the ones that kept me home and alone. I rebelled and started making my own friends, he was not happy with that and ultimately it ended our marriage. My best friend at the time was a girl named S, a girl who I met through Starter Husband who actually encouraged the friendship and introduced us. That's when he thought she was a lonely girl with no friends. Turns out she had lots of friends who ended up becoming my friends, the problem was they were all guys. Suddenly S was not a desirable social partner for me. I remember his take on this too, he loudly proclaimed "married women should not hang out with single people." He repeated this mantra over and over up until the day I moved out.

I loved my new friends, they liked to go out and see bands play, they went to all the cool bars and they knew how to have fun. This was all acceptable when we all went out together but when Starter Husband was busy and I went out, it was hell. I started going out more on purpose, like an angry teenager rebelling against strict and overbearing parents. I finally felt like I met my "LA people" after years of hanging with Starter Husband's business acquaintances. There were a few of those that had also become my friends and he would react in the same negative way if we went out without him. Like I said this behavior ended our relationship and after a few years of this I walked out the door.

That, of course, made me gun shy and I knew that one of the demands I had for the next guy would be to have no issue with me going out. I dated a bunch of guys all of them knowing that I had a life and other friends and that some of these friends were single. When I met D I told him about my posse immediately. I told him that we often watched football games, went to concerts and spent time together. He was happy to meet a girl with that kind of male energy, he especially liked the football part. As time passed and we went from casual to serious my desire to go out faded and suddenly spending time at home was preferred over going out.

Then I had a kid and spent a few years at home, partly due to my complete and utter exhaustion. Another place for the blame was the lack of available friends. The single ones had no interest in hanging with a mom but I didn't blame them, I had no interest in hanging with moms either.

So now it's a few years later and I have plenty of opportunity to go out but little desire to do so. Sure, once I'm out I have a great time but getting there is a battle. Not the battles I used to fight with Starter Husband but the internal struggle of stepping out of my comfort zone. It was funny to me earlier when D said he was demanding I go out and have fun. More than a lifetime ago I heard the same words except they were demands to stay home.

I was a good girl tonight, I went out and had fun, just as I was told. I never once looked at my watch and worried about the time. I just enjoyed the time with friends. I have to remember to listen to my husband more often.

Funny how things can change.

I'm no fool.

I Spy

So I finally have a night to myself. K is in bed and D is out with L. I had planned to write a rant about my MIL not calling me and D for our anniversary. Not that I was in the mood for that conversation, but if one is mending fences special occasions should not be ignored regardless of how she feels about our marriage. Which is clear by the lack of well wishes. I wasn't upset about it when I mentioned it to D, I was merely stating a fact that I thought was worth mentioning. So as I was procrastinating I spent some time on Facebook and found this story on D's page. How I missed it is beyond me but I felt a strong need to share it. Immediately. I don't usually cut and paste two days in a row but this is important and needs to be read. Please take a few moments to honor the memory and extraordinary life of Eileen Nearne, an incredible woman who led an unbelievable life:

Taken from The New York Times, September 21, 2010.


Eileen Nearne, Wartime Spy, Dies at 89
By JOHN F. BURNS
LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.

After World War II, Eileen Nearne, here in a photo from that era, faded into obscurity.

But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.

On Tuesday, the anonymity that Ms. Nearne had cherished in life was denied her in death. A funeral service in Torquay featured a military bugler and piper and an array of uniformed mourners. A red cushion atop her coffin bore her wartime medals. Eulogies celebrated her as one of 39 British women who were parachuted into France as secret agents by the Special Operations Executive, a wartime agency known informally as “Churchill’s secret army,” which recruited more than 14,000 agents to conduct espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines.

Funeral costs were paid by the British Legion, the country’s main veterans’ organization, and by anonymous donors who came forward after the circumstances of Ms. Nearne’s death made front-page news in Britain.

The funeral organizers said that in accordance with her wishes, her ashes would be scattered at sea.

Ms. Nearne, known as Didi, volunteered for work that was as dangerous as any that wartime Britain had to offer: operating a secret radio link from Paris that was used to organize weapons drops to the French resistance and to shuttle messages back and forth between controllers in London and the resistance.

After several narrow escapes, she was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp near Berlin, a camp that was primarily intended for women, tens of thousands of whom died there.

Ms. Nearne survived, though other women working for the Special Operations Executive were executed in the Nazi camps.

As she related in postwar debriefings, documented in Britain’s National Archives, the Gestapo tortured her — beating her, stripping her naked, then submerging her repeatedly in a bath of ice-cold water until she began to black out from lack of oxygen. Yet they failed to force her to yield the secrets they sought: her real identity, the names of others working with her in the resistance and the assignments given to her by London. At the time, she was 23.

The account she gave her captors was that she was an innocent and somewhat gullible Frenchwoman named Jacqueline Duterte, and that she had been recruited by a local businessman to transmit radio coded messages that she did not understand.

She recalled one interrogator’s attempts to break her will: “He said, ‘Liar! Spy!’ and hit me on the face. He said, ‘We have ways of making people who don’t want to talk, talk. Come with us.’ ”

From Ravensbruck, Ms. Nearne was shuttled eastward through an archipelago of Nazi death camps, her head shaved. After first refusing to work in the camps, she changed her mind, seeing the work assignments as the only means of survival.

In December 1944 she was moved to the Markleberg camp, near Leipzig, where she worked on a road-repair gang for 12 hours a day. But while being transferred yet again, she and two Frenchwomen escaped and eventually linked up with American troops.

Even then, her travails were not over. American intelligence officers initially identified her as a Nazi collaborator and held her at a detention center with captured SS personnel until her account, that she was a British secret agent, was verified by her superiors in London.
Asked by her postwar debriefers how she kept up hope, she replied: “The will to live. Willpower. That’s the most important. You should not let yourself go. It seemed that the end would never come, but I always believed in destiny, and I had a hope.”

“If you are a person who is drowning, you put all your efforts into trying to swim.”

Ms. Nearne was born on March 15, 1921, into an Anglo-Spanish family that later moved to France, where she grew up speaking French.

The family fled to Spain ahead of the German occupation of France, arriving in Britain in 1942. Ms. Nearne, her older sister, Jacqueline, and their brother, Francis, were recruited by the Special Operations Executive. In March 1944, Didi Nearne followed her sister in parachuting into France, remaining there, under the code name Agent Rose, after her sister was airlifted back to Britain.

The Gestapo had infiltrated many of the Allied spying networks, and Ms. Nearne lived on a knife’s edge. On a train journey to a new safe house south of Paris, her cover came close to being blown when a German soldier offered to carry her suitcase, which contained her secret radio. After telling him that it contained a gramophone, she hurriedly got off the train and walked with the case the rest of the way.

Describing how she lived undercover, she said after the war: “I wasn’t nervous. In my mind, I was never going to be arrested. But of course I was careful. There were Gestapo in plain clothes everywhere. I always looked at my reflection in the shop windows to see if I was being followed.”

In July 1944, the Gestapo arrived at her Paris hide-out moments after she had completed a coded transmission. She burned the messages and hid the radio, but the Germans found the radio and the pad she had used for coding the transmissions.

Parts of her story were later told in books written about wartime secret operations, including the 1966 history “SOE in France, 1940-1944,” by Michael Foot, part of a government history series by authors given special access to secret government records.

But wartime friends said after her death, on Sept. 2, that she had found it difficult to adjust to peacetime life, and a medical report in the government archives said she was suffering from psychological symptoms brought on by her wartime service. She never married, and she lived alone after her sister died in 1982.

Friends said that she withdrew into herself and shunned all opportunities to earn celebrity from her wartime experiences. In 1993, she returned to Ravensbruck for a visit, but otherwise she cherished her anonymity. As she told an interviewer several years before she died: “It was a life in the shadows, but I was suited for it. I could be hard and secret. I could be lonely. I could be independent. But I wasn’t bored. I liked the work. After the war, I missed it.”

It's a mad mad mad mad world

This is the tag for the photo above taken from Yahoo:

Former Marine Evelyn Thomas wears a pair of boots with names of former comrades who were discharged under the 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' policy. The US Senate has blocked a bid to lift a ban on gays serving openly in the military, thwarting the move with political maneuvering that now puts the issue on a back burner indefinitely.

At least my world is mad. I didn't want to make this a political blog but sometimes issues come up and I just have to rant. The whole Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy was ridiculous from the start. First of all who came up with that title? Better question is why? Honestly what difference does sexual orientation make while protecting and defending? Is there a Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy for drug abusers in the military? How about child molesters? I think those guys (and gals) are the ones who need the boot. I'm just dumbfounded by whole idea of this. My anger and disgust regarding this issue makes it difficult for me to put it into words. Rachel Maddow however, did a fantastic job. Here is what she had to say about:


From Huffington Post:
Rachel Maddow had tough words for both the GOP and the Obama administration after the defense authorization bill that could have led to the end of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was held up by a filibuster in the Senate.

Maddow, who has been a fierce and prominent advocate for the repeal of the law banning gays from serving openly in the military, delivered a 12-minute denunciation which led to one conclusion: the filibuster had nothing to do with the procedural issues Republican Senators raised on the Senate floor and everything to do with anti-gay politics.

She played clips of Republican Senators talking about everything from their inability to add amendments to the bill to concern that a military study of the efficacy of lifting "Don't Ask" was being sidelined. Then, Maddow contradicted all of those statements, pointing out that the bill would have explicitly put the question of a repeal into the military's hands, and that Republicans would have been allowed to add their own amendments.

Ultimately, Maddow concluded, the reason for the filibuster was clear:

Today Republicans did a historic thing. They chose to block funding for the entire U.S. military, and they did it not because of any of that window dressing procedural stuff they are trying to hide behind today. They did it because they want to keep this anti-gay policy in place. This is about the gays.

She also played clips of Republican Senators decrying the "far left agenda" of allowing gays to serve openly, and of predicting damage to the military if "Don't Ask" is repealed.

Maddow also noted that, in her interview with Vice President Biden, he had said that the reason the Obama administration was still enforcing "Don't Ask" was because "that is the compromise we basically had to make to get the votes to finally repeal it."
Clearly, she said, if that was true, then the other side did not hold its end of the deal up. She then asked if the White House would now cease enforcing the ban:

The White House could decide right now tonight to stop implementation of this policy pending the military's review. The right wants a culture war against gay people That's a war that in 2010 anti-gay politicians lose and pro civil rights politicians win. Does the White House leave that on the table and walk away, or do they try to win?

Watch it here.

A guy walks into a bar....

So starts the story of how I met D. I think I even wrote about this before. I was out with friends even though I wanted to stay home. It was the weekend before my birthday and I was in no mood to celebrate, I wanted to be alone and figure out what to do with my life. It was almost a year since Starter Husband I had separated and I needed to get the ball rolling on filing for divorce before he wore me down and I went back to him. I was talked into going out dancing because I was too tired to say no. I don't think I even brushed my hair. As soon as we walk into the club this guy comes up to me and asks if I want to dance. I tell him "not right now thanks" and I go off to find my friends. I end up at the bar and the guy comes back, "Wanna dance now?" he asks, "uh, not now" I tell him. He starts to walk away and I tell him that he can hang and talk, I'm just not one for dancing. I kinda felt bad for him, he was cute and seemed like a nice guy. My friends went off to dance and his friends stood across the room giving him the thumbs up.

We had a nice conversation over the super loud disco playing in the background. We were in the same industry (entertainment, go figure) and talked about that for a while, honestly I can't remember what else we talked about, it was loud and hard to hear. I succumbed to the dancing after a while, it was easier than trying to decipher the conversation besides the drinks were starting to kick in which always helps.

We danced for a while until my friends decided they were done, they were bored and had not found any boys. I was happy to be taken off the dance floor but was actually having fun with Mr. Persistence. He gave me his number and for the first time in my life I gave out mine. I had met other guys before but never felt the desire to give out my information, if I liked them I called them, I felt safer that way. This guy was different, he seemed really nice, his friends high-fiving him on the dance floor was a little dorky but I wasn't one to judge. We said goodbye and I kissed him on the cheek, shocking my friends who had never seen me so much as wave goodbye to a guy in a bar.

Eight year ago today, I married that guy. It always makes me laugh when people ask how we met, they seem to expect a long drawn out romantic fairy tale or a story of epic proportions. Nope. We met at a bar. A completely modern tale of two people who happen to be at the same place at the same time. Was it fate? Destiny? Kismet? Nah, more likely it was the DJ at Kane who had a kickass playlist of groovy disco classics. D likes to tell people that he saw me there as soon as he walked in, that there was a light shining over my head but I think that it was the club lights reflecting off my dirty unbrushed hair.

Not that I don't believe in romance, our first date that next Friday (yes I agreed to a first date on a Friday, I didn't follow the LA dating rules) was wonderful. We learned that we had plenty in common including a love of football (even though our teams were mortal enemies) and sports bars. Our relationship didn't follow the rules either, we went from on again off again to friends only back to on again. I went from separated to divorced and moved from my cool but empty bachelorette pad to a duplex with friends until moving in with D.

We went from dating to cohabitation to engaged to married in three years.

It seems like it wasn't too long ago that I walked into that bar, I can still remember what I was wearing and how much I didn't want to be there. I can distinctly remember D coming up to me over and over again and feeling completely disarmed by his smile instead of annoyed by his persistence. I remember more about the night we met and our first date then our wedding (which is a blur to me sometimes). Luckily Earth, Wind and Fire wrote a song about that night, a song that I am positive was playing in the club on the night we met:

Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away

Our hearts were ringing
In the key that our souls were singing
As we danced in the night,
Remember how the stars stole the night away

on and on - say that you remember
on and on - dancing in September
on and on - never was a cloudy day

My thoughts are with you
Holding hands with your heart to see you
Only blue talk and love,
Remember how we knew love was here to stay

Now December found the love that we shared in September.
Only blue talk and love,
Remember the true love we share today

on and on - say that you remember
on and on - dancing in September
on and on - never was a cloudy day

on and on - say do you remember
on and on - dancing in September
on and on - golden dreams were shiny days

Some bells were ringing
Our souls were singing
Do you remember,never a cloudy day?

on and on - say do you remember
on and on - dancing in September
on and on - never was a cloudy day

on and on - say do you remember
on and on - dancing in September
on and on - golden dreams were shiny days

Happy Anniversary D!

I'm glad you walked into that bar.