If you celebrate Christmas, right about now you might be preparing for a special dinner with family, finishing up some last-minute shopping, wrapping, or assembling, baking those cookies to leave along with milk for Santa, or having fun doing some other festive activity. Here is my traditional wish that your holiday is everything you hoped it would be, and that you get to spend it with exactly whom you want. As for Jim and me, you already know what we’re doing tonight and tomorrow: Enjoy the holiday, whatever that means to you!
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Awkwardly Pleasant and Pleasantly Awkward
In the week or two ahead of Christmas I do my best to cut back on errands that require me to go out in public so as to avoid the chaos. It’s bad enough dealing with the occasional distracted driver or the one who drives across parking lots like a bat out of hell or the people who bump into others without apologizing on a normal day in the spring; the second half of December is the worst. Years like this one when Hanukkah arrived and ended a little early are my favorite because it helps the cause, the cause being my sanity. Unfortunately, Jim and I do need to…
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A Taste of Home.
Jim and I recently attended the holiday party given by our Homeowner’s Association at the clubhouse just up the street. Dinner was catered, but everyone was asked to bring a dessert to share. As we made the rounds greeting neighbors we already know and meeting a few others for the first time, I glanced at the kitchen counter where all of the desserts had been placed. My heart skipped a beat when I saw something very familiar. It was a tin of individually wrapped candies, but not just any old candies: they were Frango Mints, the signature truffle sold by Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Yes, I’m aware it’s called Macy’s…
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Live.
Today we finally saw “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the film about Freddie Mercury and the origin and subsequent climb of the band Queen. The part I was most looking forward to in the movie was the end, because the filmmakers recreated Queen’s iconic performance at Live Aid, the epic 1985 concert that was held at both Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia to raise money for the relief of Ethiopian famine. I thought it would be cool to see it “again.” In fact, it was incredible and I cried from the time Freddie (played by Rami Malek) took the stage at Wembley until the very end of the movie.…
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#NaBloPoMo 2018: Check!
Today is the last day of November, and that means National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, is drawing to a close. I have attempted to blog every day in November for the last decade. I think I only “failed” once, though I don’t really count it as a fail since I tried my best and I was my only judge and jury. I thought this month was going to be really tough since I was traveling for 14 days out of 30, but I was wrong. I pre-scheduled 3 or 4 posts ahead of our Maui trip because I didn’t know what to expect as far as writing time, and…
